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.

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.’

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.

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.