Oxygen on Mars with Piyush Khopkar

Sept 19, 2023 - The Mars Oxygen ISRU Experiment (MOXIE) is an instrument onboard NASA’s Perseverance rover, currently exploring Mars. In 2021, MOXIE successfully produced oxygen from the carbon dioxide that comprises ~95% of the martian atmosphere, demonstrating, for the first time, the ability to harvest and process existent resources on other planetary bodies. A scaled-up MOXIE would contribute to sustainable human exploration of Mars, providing both life support and the oxygen required for a rocket to transport astronauts back to Earth.
Piyush Khopkar is part of the MOXIE and the Mars 2020- Perseverance Rover mission team, developing the tools to analyze mission data. Piyush has served as a NASA/JPL Solar System Ambassador since 2016, joyfully sharing the excitement of space exploration through public presentations and outreach. He works as a Software Engineer by profession and holds Master of Science in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Missouri-Columbia.