This achievement is particularly significant as it paves the way for generating breathable air for future manned missions and enables in-situ rocket propellant production for the return journey to Earth.
The device responsible for this breakthrough is called the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment (MOXIE), which was mounted on the Perseverance rover. It generated 5 grams of oxygen from the carbon dioxide in Mars’ atmosphere through an electrolysis process.
Trudy Kortes, a senior personnel at NASA, stated, “MOXIE isn’t just the first instrument to produce oxygen on another planet. It’s a technology that may help humanity live and work on other planets in the future.”
In the near term, this new technology may eventually provide oxygen for manned missions returning to Mars.
NASA estimates that transporting four astronauts off Mars would require 7 tons of rocket fuel combined with 25 tons of oxygen.
Given this reality, Michael Hecht from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) believes that sending a one-ton oxygen conversion machine to the Red Planet would be more practical than transporting such a large quantity of oxygen from Earth.
MOXIE is designed to produce up to 10 grams of oxygen per hour, and scientists currently plan to run the device at least nine more times under different conditions and speeds over the next two years.
On February 19th, the Perseverance rover entered Mars’ atmosphere at speeds of up to 19,000 km/h and touched down in the Jezero Crater. The rover has already transmitted the first black-and-white images from the Martian surface, including one that shows the spacecraft’s shadow on a desolate rocky field where it landed.
The landing of the Perseverance rover has garnered special attention as it is part of a massive two-year, $2.7 billion project aimed at searching for signs of past microbial life that may have existed on the Red Planet about 3 billion years ago.