Nasa’s rover makes breathable oxygen on Mars

breath

An instrument on Nasa’s Perseverance rover on Mars has made oxygen from the planet’s carbon dioxide atmosphere. It’s the second successful technology demonstration on the mission, which flew a mini-helicopter on Monday. The oxygen generation was performed by a toaster-sized unit in the rover called Moxie – the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment. It made 5 grams of the gas – equivalent to what an astronaut at Mars would need to breathe for roughly 10 minutes. Nasa’s thinking is that future human missions would take scaled-up versions of Moxie with them to the Red Planet rather than try to carry from Earth all the oxygen needed to sustain them.(BBC)…[+]