A microwave-oven-sized experiment inside NASA’s Perseverance rover made history in 2021 by extracting oxygen from Mars’s carbon-dioxide atmosphere—the first demonstration of producing a usable resource from the environment of another planet.

MOXIE's first hour on Mars yielded only 5.4 grams of oxygen, but it crossed a larger threshold: another planet had become the source of a useful consumable. The post A microwave-oven-sized experiment inside NASA’s Perseverance rover made history in 2021 by extracting oxygen from Mars’s carbon-dioxide atmosphere—the first demonstration of producing a usable resource from the environment of another…