MOXIE, the Mars Oxygen Generator The Perseverance Rover has produced oxygen
Scientists said this week that a two-year experiment to see if NASA could produce oxygen on Mars has ended up producing enough breathable air on the Red Planet to help a small dog survive.
The device used to produce the oxygen, known as MOXIE (Mars Oxygen Resource In situ utilization), is part of the Mars Perseverance Rover. MOXIE was created to see if Martian air could produce oxygen, and the machine ran two years of tests and experiments to explore the answer.
The device was made by the creators of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to help study future human exploration. According to a NASA press release, the device has already produced 122 grams of oxygen, the equivalent of 10 hours of breathable air for a small dog. MOXY produced 12 grams of oxygen per hour with a purity of 98%, which exceeded NASA’s original expectations.
“We are proud to be supporting advanced technology like MOXIE that can turn local resources into useful products for future exploration missions,” said Trudy Curtis, NASA’s director of technology offerings at NASA Headquarters.
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How does Moxie work?
MOXIE creates molecular oxygen in an electromagnetic process. NASA says this process separates an oxygen atom from every carbon dioxide molecule in the Martian atmosphere. As air passes through the device, it is checked for purity and the amount of oxygen produced.
On August 7, the device completed its last, final run. It produced 9.8 grams of oxygen. And the device proved that it is able to work and continue throughout the year on Mars and in all conditions provided by the Red Planet.
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The task at a glance
The Mars Perseverance Rover will land on Mars in 2021. The rover has been collecting data on Mars’ geology and climate for the past two years. According to NASA, the rover’s main mission objective is to find microbial life by collecting rocks formed by water. This process is called astrobiology.
Then, the rock samples will then be collected by another spacecraft and sent back to Earth for a more detailed examination.
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What does the completion of MOXIE mean for the future
Although the Mars Perseverance Rover still has a lot of work to complete, MOXIE has proven that future astronauts may be able to use resources from Mars to survive.
The next step is to create MOXIE 2.0 which can complete the same process as the original MOXIE but with a much larger system that can liquefy and store the oxygen produced.
