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Landing humans on Mars is a colossal challenge. Returning them to Earth is an even bigger one. Launching a return vessel requires fuel and oxygen, but the amounts needed exceed what could be transported from Earth and would therefore have to be produced on Mars. Combustible methane could possibly be produced from the carbon dioxide that makes up roughly 95 per cent of Mars’s atmosphere, but supplying the oxygen needed poses an immense problem. The hope is that the “Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment” that was delivered to the red planet aboard the Perseverance rover can serve as a prototype for the large-scale production of oxygen.
Scientific American
The technique could someday help astronauts sustainably live and work on the Red Planet
April 22, 2021
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NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover snapped this selfie with the Ingenuity helicopter on April 6, 2021. Credit: NASA, JPL-Caltech and MSSS
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NASA’s Perseverance rover just notched another first on Mars, one that may help pave the way for astronauts to explore the Red Planet someday.
The rover successfully used its MOXIE instrument to generate oxygen from the thin, carbon dioxide-dominated Martian atmosphere for the first time, demonstrating technology that could both help astronauts breathe and help propel the rockets that get them back home to Earth.