The MOXIE experiment has proven that a lunchbox-sized device can reliably produce oxygen from the Martian atmosphere.

by Sarah Wells

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Oxygen will be important not only to provide astronauts breathable air when they’re off-planet but also to help fuel rockets to eventually take them back to Earth. In a new paper published on Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, researchers from MIT explain how a small experiment roaming Mars on the back of NASA’s Perseverance rover is proof that it's possible to create oxygen from the Martian atmosphere.

This experiment is also the first to successfully harvest and use resources on any planetary body, a process that will be important not only for Martian exploration but future lunar habitats as well.

Michael Hecht is a co-author on the new paper and principal investigator of the project, called MOXIE (Mars Oxygen In Situ Resource Utilization Experiment). He told Motherboard in an email that researchers focused on harvesting oxygen because it would be one of the most difficult resources to bring from Earth and would have multiple roles to play in creating a sustainable habitat on Mars.

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MOXIE first landed on Mars in February 2021 and since then has been powered up seven different times under different seasonal and weather conditions to create oxygen using compounds in the Martian atmosphere like CO2. This air is passed through a HEPA filter to remove any dust, heated to 800 degrees Celsius and compressed such that it breaks apart into just oxygen ions and CO. The oxygen ions are then isolated and recombined to create breathable and combustible O2.

So far, MOXIE has been able to create six grams of oxygen per hour in each of its seven runs, which researchers say is equivalent to a small tree. And while MOXIE does create a small amount of CO2 and CO exhaust from this

While MOXIE is proof positive that it’s possible to create oxygen on another planet, the system itself is not yet robust enough to sustain a habitat on Mars. To do that, Hecht said that researchers will need to scale MOXIE up to the size of a “small chest freezer.” At this scale, MOXIE 2.0 could create enough oxygen to either sustain 100 crew members on Mars or lift a four-person crew off-planet in a rocket.