MIT PhD candidate Lanie McKinney is using cold plasma to turn the Martian atmosphere into oxygen and propellant for a future return trip home.
One of the hardest parts of sending humans to Mars isn’t getting there — it’s getting back. Carrying enough propellant from Earth for a full round trip is enormously impractical, which is why MIT PhD candidate Lanie McKinney is focused on a different approach: building the fuel on Mars itself, using resources already there.
“If we don’t build gas stations on Mars, it will be very difficult to get humans back to Earth,” McKinney says. “We’re going to need some way to produce the propellant on site.”
This concept, called in-situ resource utilization, or ISRU, is the foundation of McKinney’s research in MIT’s Aerospace Plasma Group, where she works with Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Associate Professor Carmen Guerra-Garcia.
Now entering her fifth year as a PhD candidate, McKinney is using cold plasma to convert carbon dioxide — which makes up the bulk of the Martian atmosphere — into oxygen and carbon monoxide, a process that could eventually support both astronaut life support and return-trip propellant.
From a Meteor Crater to MIT
McKinney’s fascination with space started early. At age 3, during a family road trip through the U.S. Southwest, her parents stopped at a massive meteor crater. As they prepared to leave, she protested: “I want to wait here for the next one.”
She didn’t yet grasp that another meteor wasn’t likely to land in the same spot — but the story, still told by her parents, captures a curiosity that never left her.
An Oklahoma native, McKinney studied physics and applied mathematics at the University of Tulsa, initially expecting to pursue astrophysics. A summer research internship at the University of Colorado at Boulder redirected her toward plasma physics, through a project on dusty plasmas in the lunar environment. “I thought it was an incredibly interesting problem,” she says.
Splitting CO2 — and the Hard Part That Comes Next
At MIT, McKinney has developed a small reactor capable of converting carbon dioxide into oxygen and other byproducts. The harder challenge, she explains, is what happens right after: separating the oxygen out before it recombines.
“We can actually perform the conversion step really well,” she says. “But what happens in a plasma is we convert it, and then we get a mixture that needs to be separated.”
Her current work pairs the plasma reactor with an oxygen-selective membrane designed to extract oxygen rapidly — territory that isn’t yet well understood, since it’s unclear exactly how the reactive plasma environment will affect the membrane over time. “We are not entirely sure what we will see,” she says.
For McKinney, what makes the work rewarding is the direct line from lab bench to future mission. “I get to work in a really cool lab and develop exciting experiments,” she says. “I get ownership over an entire experimental system, and then I get to connect that to performance requirements for a future Mars system. That’s just the dream.”
Beyond the Thesis: NASA Competitions and Cross-Disciplinary Teams
McKinney’s drive to connect research to real missions shows up throughout her time at MIT. Through the Space Resources Workshop, she’s competed in NASA challenges focused on sustaining humans in space — starting with a competition to design a self-sustaining Mars mission over a 10-year span.
“I had no clue what was going on,” she says of her first attempt. “I didn’t know anything about space systems. So, my mentality was, let me jump in and learn.”
She went on to co-lead MIT’s CERBERUZ team for NASA’s LunaRecycle Challenge, which asked teams to develop ways to recycle waste on missions to the moon and deep space. The team recently won first prize in Phase 2, earning $775,000 for a system that grinds mixed trash into powder that can be reused via injection molding to make spare parts and 3D-printing filament.
Another project, through the class Space Architecture, brought engineers and architects together to figure out how to protect lunar habitats from radiation using only resources available on the moon — landing on cast bricks made from lunar regolith, stackable without mortar or another binder.
“The kinds of innovative solutions that can be discovered when you work on a team that brings together different expertise and experiences was one of the project’s major takeaways,” McKinney says.
What Comes After Getting There
McKinney sees reaching the Moon and Mars as only the first step. “What comes next is building up a permanent presence so that we can do amazing science and be really effective at exploration,” she says.
Outside the lab, McKinney is an avid hiker and mountaineer who grew up hiking in the Rockies, recently completed a mountaineering course in Alaska, and summited Mount Baker in the Cascade Range. She sees a clear thread connecting that pursuit to her research: “I love to explore and go on adventures. And space is the ultimate thing you could explore.”
That same curiosity shaped how she found her footing at MIT after arriving from the University of Tulsa feeling out of place. “I thought that it was a fluke that I’d gotten in,” she says. “I was very nervous that I was not going to measure up to the environment.” Her approach since has been simple: “If something interests you, try it and go all in.”