Scientists are trying to brew oxygen on Mars

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Six years from now a machine that makes oxygen will be in operation on Mars.

The small oxygen device will be sent to the Red Planet with the NASA Mars 2020 mission.

"We're going to build a small instrument that will generate oxygen on Mars. It will be the prototype of a much larger 'factory' that will provide astronauts with oxygen at some point in the future," says Morten Bo Madsen, the head of the Mars group at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen.

The project is known at NASA as MOXIE (Mars OXygen In Situ resource utilisation Experiment).  Madsen's research group was selected by NASA to participate in the project alongside senior researcher Christopher Graves from the Technical University of Denmark (DTU).

How to brew oxygen on Mars

There is practically no oxygen in Mars's atmosphere, but the MOXIE device will “brew” oxygen from carbon dioxide (CO2), which there is plenty of in the planet’s atmosphere.

Read more: http://sciencenordic.com/scientists-are-trying-brew-oxygen-mars

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Interesting if it works - and it provides additional benefits with the production of carbon monoxide. Though incredibly toxic to us, it's actually a more efficient way of extracting iron from iron oxide than our method of heating with carbon. Solves the problem of any future colony having to use precious oxygen to produce the most versatile building metal we know of.