Can humans breathe on Mars?

Can humans breathe on Mars?? – Jack J., age 7, Alexandria, Virginia, United States

Suppose you are an astronaut who has just landed on the planet Mars. What do you need to survive?

Here’s the short list: Water, food, shelter – and oxygen.

Oxygen is the air we breathe on Earth. Plants and some types of bacteria produce oxygen for us.

But oxygen is not the only gas in Earth’s atmosphere. It’s not even the most abundant. In fact, only 21% of our air consists of oxygen. Almost all of the rest is nitrogen – about 78%.

You may then wonder: If there is more nitrogen in the air, why do we breathe oxygen?

Here’s how it works: Technically, when you inhale, you absorb everything in the atmosphere. But your body only uses oxygen; which you exhale when you exhale.

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Air on Mars

The atmosphere of Mars is thin – its volume is only 1% of the Earth’s atmosphere. In other words, there is 99% less air on Mars than on Earth.

That’s partly because Mars is about half the size of Earth. Its gravity is not strong enough to prevent atmospheric gases from escaping into space.

And the most abundant gas in thin air is carbon dioxide. For people on Earth, it is a poisonous gas with high concentration. Fortunately, the carbon dioxide content is less than 1% in our atmosphere. But on Mars, it is up to 96% in the air!

Meanwhile, on Mars there is almost no oxygen at all. only 1/10 percent of the air is barely enough for humans to survive.

If you try to breathe on the surface of Mars without a full set of oxygen-supplying equipment – ​​that’s a bad idea – you will die in an instant. You will suffocate, and due to low atmospheric pressureyour blood will boil , both happening at almost the same time.

Life without oxygen

So far, researchers have found no evidence of life on Mars. But the quest has only just begun; Our explorer robots haven’t found anything yet.

Needless to say, Mars has an extreme environment. And it’s not just air. Very little water on the surface of Mars. The temperature is very cold – at night, the temperature is over -100 degrees Fahrenheit (-73 degrees Celsius).

But many organisms on Earth survive in extreme environment. Life has been found in the Antarctic ice, at the bottom of the oceans and miles beneath the earth’s surface. Many of those places have very hot or cold temperatures, almost no water and little or no oxygen.

And even if life ceased to exist on Mars, it might have happened billions of years ago, when it had a thicker atmosphere, more oxygen, warmer temperature and a large amount of water was found On surface

That’s one of the goals NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover mission – to look for signs of Martian life in the past. That’s why the mission searched Martian rock for fossils of organisms that once lived – most likely, primitive life, such as Martian microbes.

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Make your own oxygen

In between seven instruments on board Perseverance rover is MOXIEan extraordinary device that removes carbon dioxide from the Martian atmosphere and converts it into oxygen.

If MOXIE works as scientists hope, future astronauts will not only make their own oxygen; they could use it as a component of the rocket fuel they needed to fly back to Earth. The more oxygen humans can produce on Mars, the less they will have to carry from Earth – and the easier it will be for visitors to get there. But even with self-generated oxygen, astronauts still need spacesuits.

Currently, NASA is working on the new technology needed to send humans to Mars. That could happen in the next decade, maybe sometime in the late 2030s. By that time, you are already grown and may be one of the first humans to set foot on Mars.

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Arina Apsarini from Binus University translated this article from English.

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