NASA has made no secret of the fact that they plan to put astronauts on the surface of Mars in the relatively near future.
They’ve also made no bones about the fact that there are a lot of pieces that still need to fall into place before they can make that happen.
Like, for example, our annoying need to breathe oxygen.
NASA has been asking it’s Perseverance Rover to turn Mars’ thin atmosphere into oxygen, and it’s most recent test went really well.
Image Credit: NASA/JPL
It uses In Situ Resource Utilization Experiment (MOXIE), which has now doubled it’s previous production level.
Image Credit: NASA/JPL
Michael Hecht, MOXIE’s principal investigator, told Space.com that the experiments are not without risk.
“This could have gone wrong. …We got great results. This was the riskiest run we’ve done.”
MOXIE works by dumping the atmosphere on Mars into a reservoir, then using an electrochemical process to tear oxygen atoms from inside carbon dioxide molecules.
Image Credit: NASA/JPL
The risk involved comes from the potential buildup of solid carbon inside, but in the end, it produced around 12 grams of oxygen in just an hour.
Scientists are hoping to build prototypes on Earth that are capable of generating enough oxygen for an entire mission, but funding is quickly running out.
If they don’t find new partners soon, we’ll have to wait even longer to see the red planet with our own two eyes.
