The biggest resource left outstanding, according to Hecht, is a propellant needed for a flight home.
The fourth question, still unanswered, wondered how we might bring all necessary resources onto Mars. That concern has been tackled as four NASA rovers landed safely on the planet between 19. Another question asked how large vehicles could land on the planet. After 2007, the Phoenix lander profiled Mars’ dust and soil chemistry, and found nutrients that could support Earth’s plants. The 2001 Mars Odyssey measured radiation on and around the planet, informing how shielding for astronauts would have to be constructed. Two revolved around proving Mars is safe enough for human missions, since the planet’s bare atmosphere menaces anything on its surface with dust storms and radiation. Michael Hecht, an associate director at MIT in charge of MOXIE, says that since the 1990s, discussions about Mars exploration always came back to a list of four open questions. “NASA definitely doesn’t want to just leave people on Mars,” says Asad Aboobaker, an engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. If successful, a larger-scale version of MOXIE’s oxygen production technology could then be used to launch a rocket home. NASA could ship liquid oxygen to the planet, but the volume needed takes up a good deal of space. Mars’ thin atmosphere is 95 percent carbon dioxide, but sending anything back into space requires fuel, and burning that fuel requires oxygen. It’s designed to demonstrate a technology that converts carbon dioxide into oxygen with a process called electrolysis. The Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment, or MOXIE, is small, about the size of a car battery. Among many other tools, the craft carries an experimental instrument that could help astronauts in the future make roundtrip voyages to the planet. This week, NASA launches its Perseverance rover on a one-way trip to the surface of Mars. The Perseverance Twitter account says it "may be one of the oldest rocks I sample, so it could help us understand the history of this place." It'll be a few years before any of Perseverance's samples are returned to Earth, but regardless, it's an exciting step forward for Perseverance after a pretty 'rocky' month.Putting boots on Mars isn’t easy, but it’s a lot easier than bringing them back. Perseverance has cored the rock again, collected another sample, and successfully placed it inside a sample tube (seen above). Even better, this particular sample is of very high interest to NASA.
The only downside, however, is that ejecting the stuck pebbles also forced Perseverance to lose its sample. Following almost a month of hard work, NASA ejected the pebbles by spinning Perseverance's drilling tools and shaking "the heck" out of them. NASA quickly found that small pebbles were stuck inside parts of Perseverance and preventing the transfer from happening. Unfortunately, the sample then refused to transfer to one of Perseverance's collection tubes. Why did Perseverance collect this latest sample from a rock it's already drilled into? On December 29, 2021, Perseverance dug into this same rock and collected a sample without a hitch.