For nearly two years, a lunchbox-sized device — which was built by NASA, the Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) at CalTech and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) — has been pumping out oxygen on Mars.After arriving on Mars in February of 2021, the Moxie machine has been working to create oxygen on the planet.The small device fits on the belly of the Perseverance rover, and uses a process known as solid oxide electrolysis to carbon dioxide into oxygen and carbon monoxide molecules.“This is the first demonstration of actually using resources on the surface of another planetary body, and transforming them chemically into something that would be useful for a human mission,” MIT professor and Moxie’s principal investigator Jeffrey Hoffman told The Guardian in August.While the current device is only meant to work for short experimental durations, The Guardian reported researchers are now proposing a scaled-up version of the device, which they hope could generate the equivalent of several hundred trees worth of oxygen and which would hopefully run continuously."