“It’s historic,” says MIT scientists.
In a significant breakthrough, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) lunchbox-sized machine has been producing oxygen from the Red Planet’s atmosphere for more than a year, giving hope of life on Mars one day.
Since April 2021, the MIT-led Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment (MOXIE) successfully made oxygen from the Red Planet’s carbon-dioxide-rich atmosphere, according to a press release published by the institute on Wednesday.
“It’s historic,” said MOXIE’s deputy principal investigator Jeffrey Hoffman, a professor of the practice in MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
MIT’s MOXIE experiment has now produced oxygen on Mars. It is the first demonstration of in-situ resource utilization on the Red Planet, and a key step in the goal of sending humans on a Martian mission.
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