Welcome to Mission Critical
Chemistry, where students at Carnegie Mellon and ITESM collaborate in teams to
develop a next-generation fuel system for a mission to Mars.
NASA has recently
developed a set of powerful reductants, and IMP has developed a set of powerful
oxidants. The goal of this mission is to identify a reductant/oxidant pair that
can serve as a fuel for a Mars mission. Neither CMU nor ITESM has all of the
information needed to solve the problem, and for international security reasons,
these components can not change hands. You must work with your international
colleagues to design experiments to solve the mission, as explained in the
Problem Description to the left. Below you will find guidelines and
objectives to complete:
After that, send an email to your international colleagues
following the guidelines in the communications memo.
Your next step is to charactarize your fuels. To do this,
determine the enthalpy of reaction between your three fuels and the standard
reductant. You will be using the Virtual Lab for this step of the activity and
should read the chemistry report before beginning in the virtual lab.
Then we'll meet again to determine the flight
parameters and launch the rocket.