While the ultimate goal of Persistence is to look for signs of ancient life on Mars, that hasn’t stopped the rover from doing other scientific work. On April 20, Perseverance successfully extracted carbon dioxide from the planet’s atmosphere and converted it into oxygen, NASA announced Wednesday. Along with a family portrait of its robotic siblings, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab equipped the rover with an instrument called the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment, or MOXIE for short.
NASA / JPL-Caltech
The toaster-sized tool allowed Perseverance to separate oxygen atoms from carbon dioxide molecules by heating the gas to about 1,470 degrees Fahrenheit and creating carbon monoxide as a byproduct. During the instrument’s initial test, it produced about five grams of oxygen, or about enough to give a lone astronaut about 10 minutes of breathing air in their suits. According to NASA, the experiment’s success paves the way for future missions, particularly those involving human astronauts, as both humans and the rockets that will carry them to and from the Red Planet need oxygen to function. As NASA puts it, a single rocket with four astronauts needs about 55,000 pounds of oxygen to get off the ground. It is not feasible to transport that much oxygen to Mars. That’s where future versions of the technology can help make planet exploration viable.
The successful experiment follows another historic first for Perseverance and NASA. Earlier this week, the agency flew a plane to another planet when it completed the first test flight of the Ingenuity Mars helicopter. Like MOXIE, Ingenuity is primarily a proof of concept, but it opens the door for future planes to explore the Red Planet.
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