Scientists Develop Device to produce Oxygen on Mars

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When it comes to deep-space travel and exploration, oxygen is one of the most important elements in the mix. Humans breathe it to live and rockets burn it to fly.
That's why a team of scientists at MIT is working on a machine that could make oxygen on Mars. This kind of a set up could play a major part in future manned missions to Mars.
The atmosphere on Mars consists of 96% carbon dioxide and less than 0.2% oxygen (Earth has about 21% oxygen). If astronauts tried breathing the air on Mars, they would quickly suffocate.
But hauling tanks of breathable oxygen to Mars takes up precious space that could otherwise store food and scientific instruments. That's where the Mars Oxygen In situ resource utilization Experiment (MOXIE for short) comes in.
MOXIE is just the beginning. If this rover-based test is successful, future missions could send larger versions of MOXIE to Mars.
"The objective is to build a 100-time scale of MOXIE some time we hope in the 2030s that will prepare liquid oxygen tanks or equivalent," Michael Hecht, another principle investigator for MOXIE and assistant director for research management at the MIT Haystack Observatory.
Those tanks will then store oxygen for breathing and rocket fuel by astronauts "to get them back from the surface of Mars into space in order to come home," Hecht said.
Making oxygen on Mars instead of bringing it along for the deep-space roadtrip would drastically reduce the cost of future manned missions to Mars.

Manufacturing Process:

The way MOXIE works is relatively straightforward: It will take the abundant carbon dioxide in the Martian atmosphere, which is made of one carbon atom and two oxygen atoms, and isolate one of the oxygen atoms. They will then combine the oxygen atoms together to make O2, which is what we breathe here on Earth.
After creating oxygen and carbon monoxide, MOXIE will release those two gases back into the Martian atmosphere.
Right now, MOXIE is designed so that it will operate for 50 Martian days (about 51 Earth days) and will produce about 20 grams (0.7 ounces) of oxygen per hour. Hoffman and Hecht hope to send a larger version of MOXIE to Mars some time in the 2030s that would produce about 2 kilograms of oxygen per hour.

Mission:

Ultimately, the idea is that NASA would send both an empty rocket and a larger version of MOXIE to Mars, before a planned human mission. 
The oxygen-producing machine would take about a year and a half to fill the rocket with enough liquid oxygen for lift off. Then, when astronauts arrived, they would have a rocket fueled up and ready for launch to take them home, Hoffman explained.

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