On today’s This Week in Space, we talk about making oxygen on Mars.
On this episode of This Week in Space (opens in new tab), Rod Pyle and Tariq Malik talk with Mike Hecht, who is the main man behind the MOXIE oxygen-making experiment on the Perseverance rover.
Mars won’t be much fun to explore if we can’t find a way to breathe there, and we’ll need fuel to come home. MOXIE was designed to make oxygen from Martian air… and it works!
Also in this episode, NASA and astronauts remember Queen Elizabeth II, NASA sets new launch date for Artemis 1 and astronaut blood reveals DNA changes in space.
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This Week in Space (opens in new tab) covers the new space age. Every Friday we take a deep dive into a fascinating topic. What’s happening with the new race to the moon and other planets? When will SpaceX really send people to Mars?
Join Rod Pyle and Tariq Malik from Space.com (opens in new tab) as they tackle those questions and more each week on Friday afternoons. You can subscribe today on your favorite podcatcher.
Rod Pyle (opens in new tab) is an author, journalist, television producer and Editor-in-Chief of Ad Astra magazine (opens in new tab). He has written 18 books (opens in new tab) on space history, exploration, and development, including Space 2.0, Innovation the NASA Way, Interplanetary Robots, Blueprint for a Battlestar, Amazing Stories of the Space Age, First On the Moon, and Destination Mars
In a previous life, Rod produced numerous documentaries and short films for The History Channel, Discovery Communications, and Disney. He also worked in visual effects on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and the Battlestar Galactica reboot, as well as various sci-fi TV pilots. His most recent TV credit was with the NatGeo documentary on Tom Wolfe’s iconic book The Right Stuff.
Responsible for Space.com’s editorial vision, Tariq Malik has been the Editor-in-Chief of Space.com since 2019 and has covered space news and science for 18 years. He joined the Space.com team in 2001, first as an intern and soon after as a full-time spaceflight reporter covering human spaceflight, exploration, astronomy and the night sky. He became Space.com’s managing editor in 2009. As on-air talent has presented space stories on CNN, Fox News, NPR and others.
Tariq is an Eagle Scout (yes, he earned the Space Exploration merit badge), a Space Camp veteran (4 times as a kid, once as an adult), and has taken the ultimate “vomit comet” ride while reporting on zero-gravity fires. Before joining Space.com, he served as a staff reporter for The Los Angeles Times covering city and education beats. He has journalism degrees from the University of Southern California and New York University.
