Carbon dioxide is already being converted into oxygen on Mars thanks to an invention undergoing testing that could lead to the colonization of the red planet.
Day and night across the seasons, a lunchbox-sized instrument generates breathable gas from Mars’s thin atmosphere. In several experimental runs, it reached its target of producing six grams per hour–about the rate of an average tree on Earth.
The study was published in the peer-reviewed multidisciplinary open-access scientific journal Science Advances on August 31. It is titled: Mars Oxygen ISRU Experiment (MOXIE)—Preparing for human Mars exploration and authored by a group of scientists, led by Professor Jeffrey Hoffman of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
