344-NASA’s Gold Box Will Make Oxygen on Mars

Perseverance’s MOXIE Generates Oxygen on Mars.

If you saw the 2015 film ‘The Martian,’ you might recall main character Mark Watney (played by Matt Damon) mentioning something called an oxygenator…well, NASA’s newest device isn’t so far off from the sci-fi tech.

The Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment, better known as MOXIE, uses a technology called solid oxide electrolysis, and the goal? To produce oxygen from the Martian carbon-dioxide atmosphere for both propellant and breathing.

NASA is continuing to prepare for human exploration of Mars and is set to launch its next rover to the red planet in 2020. Seven instruments will be aboard the rover, six of which are focused on sample analysis like this SuperCam and a spectrometer called PIXL that’ll measure chemical signatures of Martian rocks. And MOXIE is the seventh.

We sat down with NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory Instrument Systems Engineer Asad Aboobaker to find out more about how exactly MOXIE will make oxygen on Mars, check out this Focal Point to find out more.

Technicians at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory lower the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment (MOXIE) instrument into the belly of the Perseverance rover. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech