Watch out, trees, you have some competition.
A robot the size of a lunchbox has been making oxygen on Mars since February 2021.
MIT says that its Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment (MOXIE) was deployed as part of NASA’s Perseverance rover mission. In the year-and-a-half since, „MOXIE was able to produce oxygen on seven experimental runs, in a variety of atmospheric conditions, including during the day and night, and through different Martian seasons,“ MIT says in a news release.
MOXIE currently produces approximately six grams of oxygen per hour, which MIT compares to „a modest tree on Earth.“ (It’s unclear how much a particularly braggadocious tree produces.
