You know what they say that you can’t live without love, but oxygen might be even more important. That’s especially available on Mars, where one of the reasons why we can’t move our luggage there yet is that there’s not enough oxygen. But thanks to science, that can indeed change in the future.
NASA’s Perseverance rover brought onboard the MOXIE gadget to Mars, which stands for Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment. The mission of MOXIE is to produce oxygen on the Red Planet, and it keeps making it even today. CNET now reveals that scientists claim that MOXIE is producing oxygen on our neighboring planet as well as a tree does it on Earth.
Still more to prove
NASA’s MOXIE still has plenty of exciting scientific stuff to prove. Here’s what Michael Hecht has to say, who is the principal investigator of the MOXIE mission from the Haystack Observatory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology:
The only thing we have not demonstrated is running at dawn or dusk, when the temperature is changing substantially,
We do have an ace up our sleeve that will let us do that, and once we test that in the lab, we can reach that last milestone to show we can really run any time.
A video from Reuters explains to us more about MOXIE:
Scientists seem very optimistic when it comes to creating enough oxygen on Mars. It’s obvious that we need as much of the chemical element as possible if we ever want to live on the Red Planet.
Otherwise, Mars has a few interesting similarities to Earth: roughly the same size, both planets have mountains and valleys, seasons, weather and volcanoes, and so on.
