Meet the magical box that could produce oxygen on Mars! Okay, maybe not magical. The Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment (MOXIE) is capable of pulling oxygen from Mars’ poisonous atmosphere! The golden, breadbox-sized apparatus is tucked away inside Perseverance’s chassis, and the first demonstration of MOXIE will be called in-situ resource utilization (ISRU), as Live Science details:
NASA has long been interested in ISRU and put out a call for an oxygen-producing experiment when Perseverance was first being conceived, Eric Daniel Hinterman, an aerospace engineering doctoral student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and member of the MOXIE team, told Live Science.
While oxygen is useful for astronauts to breathe, Hinterman said that it's even more important as rocket propellant. When combined with hydrogen, oxygen combusts in a powerful explosion that is used to lift many modern rockets from their launch pads.
In addition to the propellant needed to get off Earth and fly to Mars, a spacecraft bringing humans to the Red Planet would need between 66,000 and 100,000 pounds (30,000 and 45,000 kilograms) of oxygen to return home, according to NASA. "We can send that oxygen from Earth to Mars, but if we can make it on the surface that potentially saves us a lot of money," Hinterman said.
Any additional oxygen produced through ISRU technology could go into life-support systems for astronauts while on the surface of Mars, Hinterman said.
In order to reach the ground, Perseverance had to go through a complicated sky crane maneuver and the famous "seven minutes of terror" that subjected all of its components to some fairly extreme forces. A few days after landing, the MOXIE team put the instrument through a series of what are known as "aliveness" tests to make sure it was in working order.
Image via Live Science