For all the CO2 lovers out there.
This is an exciting concept on how to make the most of the CO2 on Mars.
Hopefully it lands safely tomorrow.
https://www.space.com/perseverance-..._content=SDC_Newsletter &utm_term=3177375Here's how the Perseverance landing could pave the way for humans on MarsThere's no breathing easy on Mars.
Engineers lowered MOXIE into the Mars Perseverance rover in March 2019. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Tucked in the belly of NASA's Mars Perseverance rover is a golden box that, if all goes well, will turn some of the Red Planet's thin, carbon-dioxide-rich atmosphere into sweet, sweet oxygen.
The experiment, called
Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment (MOXIE), is meant to demonstrate technology that could one day support a crewed mission to Mars, since oxygen is a vital resource for humans to breathe and rockets to burn. And with the
Perseverance rover due to touch down on the Red Planet tomorrow (Feb. 18), the MOXIE team is excited to be one step closer to the experiment's first test.
"MOXIE is intended to be a demonstration of a technology that will allow us to fill up the oxygen tanks that a team of future astronauts will need to fly home, to take off from Mars," the experiment's principal investigator, Michael Hecht, an experimental scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Haystack Observatory, told Space.com. "Also to breathe, but rockets breathe more than people and that's the big job."
