Making Oxygen on Mars – It Works! #space #mars #real-life #scifibooks

NASA’s Mars 2020 mission and Perseverance rover may be best known for the plucky little helicopter that hitched a ride to become the first aircraft on another world, but the excitement doesn’t stop there.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

On the red and dusty surface of Mars, nearly 100 million miles from Earth, an instrument the size of a lunchbox is proving it can reliably do the work of a small tree, successfully making oxygen from the Red Planet’s carbon-dioxide-rich atmosphere since April 2021. MIT.edu and Science Advances

Martian explorers will need oxygen to breath and for fuel systems, such as in a rocket to return them to Earth. That’s not the end of the story, of course. Earthly air is 78% nitrogen, but as an inert gas, once a habitat is filled, the nitrogen should be permanent (baring a leak… more possible trouble.)

But… Yee Ha!

“This is the first demonstration of actually using resources on the surface of another planetary body, and transforming them chemically into something that would be useful for a human mission,” says Jeffrey Hoffman, a professor at MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Take a deep breath, Mars lovers. Someone, someday, will be able to breath O2 made this way on Mars.

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