NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover extracts first oxygen from Red Planet.

 Erin Foley

AP Biology C Block Odd

Current Event 20

April 25th, 2021

Grossman, Lisa. NASA. “NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover extracts first oxygen from Red 

Planet.” April 21, 2021.

On April 21st, NASA’s Perseverance rover split carbon molecules to create oxygen on Mars. Carbon dioxide molecules are made up of two oxygen atoms and a carbon atom, thus when the rover split them into their component parts, it created 10 minutes worth of breathable oxygen. There was actually enough oxygen to make tiny amounts of rocket fuel. The rover’s ability to perform this mechanism comes from its instrument called MOXIE (Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment), which scientists like principal investigator Michael Hecht of MIT have called an “electrical tree” that breathes in CO2 and pumps out oxygen. Oxygen is necessary for most fuel-burning activities on Earth, from burning gas in a car to burning a log in a fireplace. In space travel, oxygen is also needed for rockets to fly to and from Earth. Since Mars’ atmosphere is primarily composed of carbon dioxide, which we now have the ability to convert to oxygen with MOXIE, astronauts could potentially create enough rocket fuel to power a trip home to Earth. To create this amount of fuel (about 25 metric tons of oxygen) would save astronauts from having to take such a massive amount with them on a trip to Mars. Although MOXIE would need to run continuously for a very long time in order to create such a large amount of oxygen, this innovation makes a human trip to Mars seem much more attainable.

The successful use of MOXIE proves that we are closer than ever before to achieving a trip to Mars. For years, a human trip to Mars has seemed too dangerous to ever pull off. Mars’ atmosphere is thick enough to burn a spacecraft up upon entry, its temperatures are extreme and dangerous, and its dust storms ensure that no traveler to Mars will be welcomed with open arms. However, one obstacle to traveling to Mars - the large amount of fuel required to lift off from Mars - has been broken down with the innovation of MOXIE. When human travel to Mars is achieved, the benefits to us on Earth are endless. As climate change ramps up around us, more and more land is becoming uninhabitable for crops, but we may find out how to overcome these conditions by learning how to grow food on Mars. Moreover, as researchers try to figure out how to make Mars’ atmosphere habitable using microbes - a practice called “terraforming” - they may come to understand how we can use microbes to clean up air pollution and oil spills on Earth. Finally, the prospect of 3D printing on Mars’ zero-gravity surface has led scientists to believe that printing out body parts would be possible if done on Mars. According to a researcher at Techshot, Dr. Bolan, with zero gravity, “we can print complex structures and they will stand up. If you print here on the ground, it’s a puddle”. By traveling to Mars, humans will have a world of research opened to them, and in a hundred or so years, could find a way to make Mars habitable. The invention of MOXIE will not allow us to immediately pack our bags for the Red Planet, but it speeds up the mission by at least a decade.

This article was informative and engaging, albeit a little lacking in background information. The author, Lisa Grossman, effectively opens up the article by saying that “NASA’s Perseverance rover just created a breath of fresh air on Mars,” which really drew me into the rest of the article. Moreover, Grossman demonstrates high-level writing as she notes the successes of MOXIE as well as its room for improvement. She writes that “MOXIE can’t run continuously” and that its oxygen production didn’t make “enough to breathe for very long,” but clarified that MOXIE is a prototype, allowing the reader to see how improvements to MOXIE can be made in the future. However, Grossman did not really discuss the societal impact of MOXIE past the fact that it will allow astronauts to create fuel for their return rather than bringing it on their trip. This in itself is obviously a huge impact, but if she wanted to make a greater impression on the reader, she should have discussed why a trip to Mars would be such a big deal to humans - that it’s not just another box to tick off on the space race's list of goals. Still, Grossman’s summary of the events of last Friday illustrates how the movement of humans closer and closer to Mars has been propelled by oxygen-creation innovations.