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NASA’s Perseverance Rover has a device on board called the MOXIE that will convert the air available on Mars into oxygen. The device is a test, and if the technology were used on a larger scale, it could produce oxygen for humans to breathe on the red planet and could be used for rocket fuel. NASA knows that one of the most challenging parts of getting people to Mars will be getting them off the planet and back to Earth.
Two getting a crew to get away from Mars would require 55,000 pounds of oxygen to produce the thrust from 15,000 pounds of rocket fuel. Rather than sending all the oxygen needed from Earth to Mars, the scientists want to allow astronauts to create rocket fuel to Mars. MOXIE is a first generation oxygen generator designed to test the technology that could create the required oxygen.
MOXIE stands for Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment and is a completely separate experiment from the primary scientific mission of Perseverance. One of the main missions of Perseverance is to recover rock samples that can be returned to earth that may have signs of ancient microbial life. MOXIE focuses on the engineering needed for future human exploration efforts.
The principal investigator of the MOXIE device is Michael Hecht of MIT. He says rocket propellant is the heaviest consumable resource astronauts on Mars will need. Being able to produce oxygen at the destination would make the first manned trip to Mars easier, safer and cheaper. It will be a challenge to create oxygen on Mars as the Martian atmosphere is only one percent thick than the atmosphere here on Earth and is 95 percent carbon dioxide.
MOXIE draws in air using a pump and then uses an electrochemical process to separate two oxygen atoms from each carbon dioxide molecule. As the gases flow through the system, they are analyzed to see how much oxygen has been produced, how pure it is and how efficiently the machine is operating. After each experiment is performed, all gases are coined into the atmosphere.
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