In the Perseverance rover mission on the planet Mars last February, the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment (MOXIE) was one of the machines carried once. This MIT-invented machine can generate oxygen using the Martian atmosphere. After more than a year of conducting experiments, MIT now says MOXIE is now able to produce the same amount of oxygen as a small tree.
Despite already being on Mars, the experiment was only successfully performed about 7 times the need to run the Perseverance system and other experiments. But the data shows that MOXIE produces 6 grams of oxygen per hour which is equivalent to a small tree on earth. MOXIE can also generate oxygen in various weather and also at night.
In the first test MOXIE produced 5.4 grams of oxygen per hour by processing carbon dioxide from the Martian air. This is equivalent to the supplies an astronaut needs for 10 minutes.
With this success, the research team will develop MOXIE on a large scale to enable it to become an oxygen generating machine for astronauts arriving on Mars in the future.
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