Mars rover Perseverance sets new record for making oxygen on Red Planet

By Leonard David published about 15 hours ago

MOXIE is the first experiment to suck in the planet's thin, carbon dioxide-laden air and transform that native resource into oxygen.



a wheeled robot on Mars
Artist's illustration of NASA's Perseverance rover on Mars. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)


GOLDEN, Colorado - Breathe easy: There's good news from Mars.

Tucked inside NASA's Perseverance Mars rover is a device known as MOXIE, short for Mars Oxygen In Situ Resource Utilization Experiment. MOXIE is the first experiment to suck in the planet's thin, carbon dioxide-laden air and transform that native resource into oxygen. The toaster-sized device, if built to a larger scale, can be used not just for astronaut expeditions to Mars for breathing, but also for rocket fuel.

Earlier this month, the experiment achieved a major milestone when researchers pushed MOXIE to a maximum production level — a factor of two higher than reached earlier.

Riskiest run
"We got great results," said Michael Hecht, MOXIE's principal investigator and an associate director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT) Haystack Observatory in Westford, Massachusetts.

"This was the riskiest run we've done," Hecht told Space.com in an exclusive interview. "This could have gone wrong," he said, and could have led to minor damage to the instrument, but it didn't. The milestone setting Mars run took place on June 6, operating during the Martian night, and lasted 58 minutes, Hecht said.

More:
https://www.space.com/mars-perseverance-rover-oxygen-experiment-moxie-record