BBC News
image captionThe Moxie unit is about the size of a toaster
An instrument on Nasa s Perseverance rover on Mars has made oxygen from the planet s carbon dioxide atmosphere.
It s the second successful technology demonstration on the mission, which flew a mini-helicopter on Monday.
The oxygen generation was performed by a toaster-sized unit in the rover called Moxie - the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment.
It made 5 grams of the gas - equivalent to what an astronaut at Mars would need to breathe for roughly 10 minutes.
Nasa s thinking is that future human missions would take scaled-up versions of Moxie with them to the Red Planet rather than try to carry from Earth all the oxygen needed to sustain them.
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