A device that could produce oxygen on Mars might revolutionize manned missions to the Red Planet and beyond.
Researchers at MIT are developing the Mars Oxygen in Situ Resource Utilization Experiment, nicknamed MOXIE, which NASA has approved as one of seven science instruments to be carried by Mars 2020, Curiosity’s successor.
Mars’ thin atmosphere is composed of only 0.2 percent oxygen and 96 percent carbon dioxide. It would cause immediate suffocation to any person who tried breathing it.
In contrast, Earth’s atmosphere is 21 percent oxygen.
In addition to being necessary for astronauts to breathe, oxygen is also needed to fuel rockets.
Launching enough oxygen fuel tanks for astronauts to make a return trip to Earth is prohibitively expensive. MOXIE principal investigator and former astronaut Jeffrey A. Hoffman estimated 30 tons of fuel would be needed for a rocket to return astronauts from Mars to Earth.
Making that much fuel would require launching between 300 and 450 tons of propellant.
The ability to produce oxygen on Mars could save missions billions of dollars.
Powered by electricity produced via a separate machine, MOXIE will extract carbon dioxide from Mars’ atmosphere and separate one of the molecule’s two oxygen atoms from it, then combine to oxygen atoms to produce oxygen or O2.
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