Let’s pretend you’re an astronaut who has just landed on Mars. What would you require to stay alive? Here’s a brief selection to get you started: Water, food, shelter, and oxygen are all necessities. The air we breathe on Earth contains oxygen. It is provided for us by plants and some microorganisms. However, oxygen isn’t the sole gas in the atmosphere. It isn’t even the most plentiful. In fact, oxygen makes up just 21% of our atmosphere. The remaining 78 percent is almost all nitrogen.
You might be asking why we breathe oxygen while there is more nitrogen in the air. The following is how it works: When you breathe in, you technically take in everything in the environment. However, your body only consumes oxygen, and the remainder is exhaled out. ON MARS, THE AIR, The Martian atmosphere is extremely thin, accounting for only 1% of the Earth’s. In other words, there is 99 percent less air on Mars than there is on Earth. This is largely due to the fact that Mars is roughly half the size of Earth. It has insufficient gravity to prevent atmospheric gases from escaping into space. Carbon dioxide is the most prevalent gas in that thin air. At high quantities, this is a toxic gas for people on Earth.
Thankfully, it accounts for less than 1% of our atmosphere. However, carbon dioxide makes over 96 percent of the air on Mars! Meanwhile, there is essentially little oxygen on Mars; it makes up only one-tenth of one percent of the atmosphere, far too little for humans to exist. You’d die in an instant if you tried to breathe on the surface of Mars without a spacesuit delivering your oxygen. You’d suffocate, and your blood would boil due to the low air pressure, all at the same time.
AN EXPERIENCE WITHOUT OXYGEN, So yet, no evidence of life on Mars has been discovered. However, our robotic probes have only scraped the surface of the quest. Without a doubt, Mars is a harsh environment. It’s not just the air, either. The Martian surface has very little liquid water. The weather is very cold, with temperatures dropping below -100 degrees Fahrenheit at night (-73 degrees Celsius).
However, many creatures on Earth can withstand harsh conditions. Life has been discovered in Antarctic ice, at the ocean’s bottom, and kilometres beneath the Earth’s surface. Many of those locations are extremely hot or cold, have little to no water, and have little to no oxygen. Even if life did exist on Mars billions of years ago, when it had a thicker atmosphere, more oxygen, warmer temperatures, and considerable volumes of liquid water on the surface, it is possible that it did. One of NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover mission’s objectives is to hunt for clues to ancient Martian life. Perseverance is looking for remains of species that formerly existed on Mars, most likely primitive life-like as Martian microorganisms, in the Martian rocks.
OXYGEN FOR DO-IT-YOURSELF, MOXIE, an extraordinary mechanism that absorbs carbon dioxide from the Martian atmosphere and converts it to oxygen, is one of the seven instruments on board the Perseverance rover. If MOXIE works as expected, future astronauts will be able to produce their own oxygen as well as use it as a component of the rocket fuel they’ll need to return to Earth.
The more oxygen humans can produce on Mars, the less oxygen they’ll need to import from Earth, making it simpler for tourists to arrive. Even if “homegrown” oxygen is available, astronauts will still require a spacesuit. NASA is currently developing the new technologies required to transport humans to Mars. This might happen in the coming decade, possibly in the late 2030s. You’ll be an adult by then, and perhaps one of the first to set foot on Mars.
