NASA manages to produce enough oxygen on Mars to sustain an astronaut for a few hours – raising hopes for future colonies on the Red Planet

When the first astronauts land on Mars, they may have to thank a device the size of a microwave for the air they breathe.

That’s because a small, golden cube aboard NASA’s Perseverance rover has produced enough oxygen on the Red Planet to keep a human alive, at least for a while.

In total, the MOXIE instrument has produced 122 grams of oxygen since it landed on Mars in 2021 – enough to sustain an astronaut for about three hours and forty minutes.

Experts believe future versions of the instrument sent to Mars could store oxygen to keep future astronauts alive or make fuel to get them home.

Perseverance and its many instruments (including MOXIE) landed on Mars in February 2021 after a nearly seven-month journey through space.

The six-wheeled rover is on Mars to search for signs of ancient life, search for water and collect samples of Martian soil and rocks to one day return to Earth

MOXIE first produced oxygen in April 2021 and has now extracted oxygen from the Martian atmosphere a total of sixteen times.

The instrument makes molecular oxygen through a clever process that separates one oxygen atom from each molecule of carbon dioxide pumped in from Mars’ thin atmosphere.

As these gases flow through the system, they are analyzed to check their purity and the amount of oxygen produced.

At its most efficient, MOXIE has managed to produce 12 grams of oxygen per hour with a purity of 98 percent or better, NASA said.

According to the space agency, the modest golden cube has proven to be more successful than its creators at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) expected.

Nevertheless, MOXIE has fulfilled its duty and its operations are now ending, although parent rover Perseverance will continue and currently has no planned end date.

“MOXIE’s impressive performance shows that it is feasible to extract oxygen from the Martian atmosphere – oxygen that could help provide breathing air or rocket fuel for future astronauts,” said NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy.

‘Developing technologies that allow us to utilize resources on the Moon and Mars is critical to building a long-term lunar presence, creating a robust lunar economy and enabling us to launch a first human exploration campaign to Mars to support.’

The important work of MOXIE (who traveled to Mars with the rover Perseverance) raises hopes for future colonies on the Red Planet (photo)

A full-scale test model of the Perseverance rover currently on Mars is shown during a press conference for the Mars Sample Return mission in the Mars Yard at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California on April 11, 2023

MOXIE is built with heat-resistant materials such as nickel alloy and designed to withstand the high temperatures of 800°C required to function.

A thin gold coating keeps heat from radiating and damaging the rover. Future versions could be much larger and power a rocket launch.

Now that MOXIE’s mission is complete, scientists want to build a system that has an oxygen generator like MOXIE, but also a device that can liquefy, store and store that oxygen.

Not only would having oxygen on Mars allow future astronauts to breathe, but it could eliminate the need to transport large amounts of oxygen from Earth to use as rocket fuel for the return trip.

Such a follow-up to MOXIE could be part of NASA’s Artemis program, which prepares manned missions to the moon but also lays the foundation for missions to Mars.

The US space agency will return humans to the moon’s surface in 2025, although manned missions to the Red Planet won’t take place until 2030.

Meanwhile, billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk thinks he can beat NASA by sending manned flights to Mars as early as the second half of this decade.

“This is a critical first step in turning carbon dioxide into oxygen on Mars,” said NASA’s Jim Reuter, adding that it will make future human missions more viable. Stock image

Perseverance is the heaviest cargo ever to land on the Red Planet – with a car the size of 1,025 kg.

The Mars rover is tasked with searching for traces of fossilized microbial life from Mars’ distant past and collecting rock samples to return to Earth.

However, Perseverance doesn’t return the monsters to Earth; the rover will store them in certain locations on Mars to collect them for a future retrieval mission, which is currently being developed.

In addition to MOXIE, the rover carried a small helicopter called Ingenuity to Mars, which performed the first powered flight on another planet, as well as more than 50 consecutive flights.

Hard at work: NASA’s Perseverance rover and Ingenuity helicopter search for life on the Red Planet

NASA’s Mars 2020 mission was launched to search for signs of ancient life on the Red Planet, in an effort to help scientists better understand how life evolved on Earth in the early years of the solar system’s evolution.

The main car-sized rover, named Perseverance, explores an ancient river delta in the Jezero crater, which was once filled with a 500-meter-deep lake.

The region is believed to have harbored microbial life some 3.5 to 3.9 billion years ago, and the rover will examine soil samples to look for evidence of life.

NASA’s Mars 2020 rover (artist’s impression) looks for signs of ancient life on Mars in an effort to help scientists better understand how life evolved on our own planet

The $2.5bn (£1.95bn) Mars 2020 spacecraft launched on July 30 with the rover and helicopter inside – and landed successfully on February 18, 2021.

Perseverance landed in the crater and will slowly collect samples that will eventually be returned to Earth for further analysis.

A second mission will fly to the planet and return the samples, perhaps towards the end of the 2020s in collaboration with the European Space Agency.

This concept art shows the Mars 2020 rover landing on the red planet via NASA’s ‘sky-crane’ system