8 Ways We're Getting Ready To Go To Mars
5. Making Oxygen
Mars is considered, in many ways, to be the Earth's twin. This is apart from one pretty major detail: oxygen.
Oxygen is pretty essential to deep space travel. Astronauts gotta breathe it, engines gotta burn it, and Mars space doesn't seem to have an awful lot of it. Mars atmosphere is 96% carbon dioxide and less than 0.2% oxygen.
For this reason, the boffins at MIT are working on a machine that could make oxygen on Mars. The Mars Oxygen In situ resource utilization Experiment (or MOXIE for short) is projected to save NASA billions of dollars by doing away with the necessity of dragging a load of oxygen tanks along, and synthesizing it from the Martian environment itself.
A larger version of the technology would also be able to produce liquid rocket fuel using a similar process, which could be used in reusable rockets.
NASA have since announced that MOXIE will be taking pride of place as one of the instruments aboard the Mars rover mission in 2020, giving it opportunity to prove its worth on a mission and keep the astronauts breathing.