A lot of cool things have happened since I have been away working on my thesis, and one of the absolute coolest is that MOXIE, an experiment sent to Mars on the Perseverance rover, completed its mission of turning the CO₂ in the Martian atmosphere into oxygen. This is a gamechanger - it proves we can have access to oxygen on Mars, taking us leaps closer to a crewed Mars mission. MOXIE is a golden box weighing 37.7 pounds and about the size of a microwave oven. The gold protects the rest of the rover from the intense heat that MOXIE uses to perform its experiment, heating and compressing the CO₂ before passing it onto the electrolysis unit which then converts it into O₂. The CO₂ is heated to about 800°C and compressed, and then the conversion with electrolysis begins. But you can't simply split the O₂ off from the C, you need two CO₂ molecules that then split this into two CO molecules, plus one O₂ molecule. This process requires less energy and is faster than splitting the C from the O₂, and prevents the buildup of carbon solids on the electronics, which would degrade the experiment. The O₂ is stored and tested for purity, while the CO is released into the atmosphere. From the time Perseverance landed on Mars in March 2021, MOXIE has produced 122 grams of oxygen of at least 98% purity, which is twice as much as NASA expected and enough for a small puppy to breathe for 10 hours. This proves that making oxygen on Mars is possible! This takes us leaps forward in the quest to send astronauts to Mars: it shows we have a way of providing astronauts oxygen to breathe, as well as to launch a spacecraft on the Martian surface and return back home. This is important because taking enough oxygen there would be impractical: a rocket would need around 55,000 pounds of oxygen to simply lift off of Mars. So these results from MOXIE show that we wouldn't need to bring oxygen and can make it right on the surface of the planet! Next step would be a full-scale system can convert enough oxygen fast enough, and store it, on Mars. The future of space exploration looks brighter than ever! 🚀 Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech