NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover launched from Cape Canaveral on July 30, carrying “a host” of cutting-edge technology, including high-definition video equipment and the first interplanetary helicopter, Susie Neilson reported on Business Insider Aug. 8. Many of the tools the rover carries are designed as experimental steps to prepare for human exploration of Mars. One crucial addition to the toolbox is a device called the “Mars Oxygen In Situ Resource Utilization Experiment,” or MOXIE, which is an attempt to produce breathable oxygen on a planet where oxygen makes up less than 0.2% of the atmosphere. Not only is oxygen necessary for human life; it is also a cumbersome payload on space missions. It is highly unlikely that astronauts could bring enough of it to Mars for humans to breathe there, let alone fuel spaceships for the journey back to Earth.
That is the problem MOXIE is looking to solve, Neilson says. The car-sized battery robot is a roughly 1% scale model of the device scientists hope to send to Mars in the 2020s. MOXIE works like a tree, taking in carbon dioxide, though it is designed specifically for the Martian atmosphere. It then electrochemically splits the molecules into oxygen and carbon monoxide, and combines the oxygen molecules into O2; then analyzes the O2 for purity, aiming for about 99.6% O2. Then it releases both breathable oxygen and the carbon monoxide back into Mars’ atmosphere. In the future, scaled-up devices would use tanks to store the oxygen produced, for eventual use by humans and rockets.