NASA’s Perseverance Rover makes Oxygen on Mars

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) launched Perseverance, nicknamed Percy, on July 30, 2020. NASA started the planning of the project in 2013 and began building the spacecraft in 2016. It was completed in February 2020 and launched five months later. Perseverance landed on Mars on February 18, 2021. 

Perseverance is a car-sized spacecraft. Its mission is to examine the climate, surface, and internal structure of Mars. The rover will also experiment with various technologies to see if human exploration is possible on the planet. Along with these scientific objectives, Perseverance will also collect rock samples from Mars’ surface.

Perseverance has been active on Mars for over 2 years now. Inside the Rover, is a small device called MOXIE (Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment) whose aim is to produce oxygen from Mars’s atmosphere. The atmosphere on Mars is thin. 96% of the atmosphere is made up of carbon dioxide. Only 0.13% is made up of oxygen. MOXIE has a rate of oxygen production of 10 grams per hour. So far MOXIE has made breathable oxygen on 16 different occasions since its first attempt. It has succeeded in making 122 grams of breathable oxygen on Mars. This amount is enough for an astronaut to breathe for almost three hours.