In a major advancement toward sending astronauts to Mars, a toaster-sized instrument aboard the Jet Propulsion Laboratory-managed Perseverance rover successfully extracted oxygen from the atmosphere of the Red Planet, NASA officials announced Wednesday.
The feat was accomplished by an instrument known as the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment, or MOXIE. The equipment utilized the Martian atmosphere, which is 96% carbon-dioxide, and extracted 5 grams of oxygen. That's roughly 10 minutes of breathable oxygen for an astronaut.
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