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Is There Oxygen on Mars?

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We Asked a NASA Technologist.

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Yes, Mars has oxygen but not very much and\h
definitely not enough for you to just go out and

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breathe on the surface of Mars. The density of the\h
oxygen on Mars is about 1/10,000th of what we have

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here on Earth. But Mars' atmosphere does have a lot\h
of carbon dioxide — about 500 times more CO2 than\hoxygen.

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So if we want to harvest oxygen on Mars for\h
use by future explorers or launch systems, a better

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way might be to pull some of it out of the CO2 and\h
use that instead. So that's where MOXIE comes in.

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MOXIE is a technology on NASA's Perseverance\h
rover and it has proven for the very first

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time that we can extract oxygen from the carbon\h
dioxide in the Martian atmosphere. It's a tech

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demo so it only produces a small amount of oxygen.\h
But for future human exploration, we would need to send

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a scaled up version, maybe 200 times larger than\h
the current MOXIE. So if such a system were landed

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on Mars, some of this would provide oxygen for\h
the astronauts to breathe but most of it would

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be used as rocket propellant to get astronauts\h
off the surface of Mars and back to Earth.

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So is there oxygen on Mars? Not much, but\h
that's okay because we can make it ourselves.