Making oxygen on Mars: Rover tests technology to make Red Planet breathable
NASA rover turns carbon dioxide into oxygen on Mars
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And this week, Perseverance was successful in one major test: Creating oxygen!
Mars’ atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide, but that doesn’t cut it humans need oxygen to breathe, and also for rocket fuel to return home.
So, when Perseverance landed on Mars earlier this year, it brought with it a toaster-size instrument called the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment or “MOXIE” for short.
Here’s how it works: Carbon dioxide is made up of one carbon atom and two oxygen atoms. MOXIE separates the two oxygen atoms from that carbon atom and, voila, you have oxygen!
BBC News
The American space agency has completed a second helicopter flight on Mars.
The small Ingenuity drone hovered 5m above the ground, tilted and moved laterally 2m, before then reversing and putting itself back down on the spot from which it took off.
Nasa wants each successive outing to up the ante - for the little chopper to fly higher, further and faster.
On Monday, Ingenuity made history by performing the first powered, controlled flight on another world.
All told, it s been a stunning week for the space agency, which also successfully demonstrated how you could make oxygen (O₂) from Mars carbon dioxide (CO₂) atmosphere.
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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.