Dr. Michael Hecht, Principal Investigator for the MOXIE experiment, toasts Perseverance’s touchdown
Credit: Michael Hecht
Since at least the time of Percival Lowell, who popularized the idea that civilizations might exist on Mars at the dawn of the 20th century, we have envisioned living on other worlds. But since the 1950s we have come to realize that the rest of the solar system is much less hospitable than we had hoped, and this hostility to human life extends to Mars. With an atmosphere comprised of mostly carbon dioxide and a density just 1/100th that of Earth’s, along with plunging temperatures, surviving will be a major challenge. But if we could find breathable oxygen there, the problem becomes surmountable—and that’s what the MOXIE experiment, located on the Perseverance Mars rover, is all about.
Michael Hecht, formerly of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and currently the Associate Director for Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Haystack Observatory, is leading the charge to utilize in-situ resources (ISRU) on Mars.