The small oxygen device will be sent to the Red Planet with the NASA Mars 2020 mission.

“We’re going to build a small instrument that will generate oxygen on Mars. It will be the prototype of a much larger ‘factory’ that will provide astronauts with oxygen at some point in the future,” says Morten Bo Madsen, the head of the Mars group at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen…

“MOXIE works like a sort of fuel cell in reverse. A fuel cell produces energy by melting together hydrogen and oxygen to produce water. Instead, we’ll be using energy to remove an oxygen atom from CO2,” says Madsen.