Moxie: oxygen to breathe on Mars

FAttached to the Perseverance robot that landed on Mars on February 18, 2021, the Moxie demonstrator produced oxygen from carbon dioxide, most of it in the red planet’s atmosphere – a great first. It is true that it took him a full day to produce 5 grams of oxygen (O2), enough to make an astronaut breathe for… ten minutes, but the feat is no less formidable. “By increasing the size of the equipment, we will be able to produce much more,” explains Alexis Paillet, head of the Spaceship project at the National Center for Space Studies (Cnes). This division of the French space agency aims to “find all the technological niches to prepare a future base on the Moon or on Mars, by 2040 or 2050”, details its …

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