SALT LAKE CITY (ABC4) – “To boldly go, where no one has gone before.” Millions of people have heard those words for generations. Now NASA’s M.O.X.I.E. experiment on Mars has made the famous words even more real.

For the first time in human history, oxygen has been extracted on another planet. Utah’s OxEon Energy created the device that makes the process work. A mini-factory that converts carbon dioxide on Mars into oxygen. They call it Soxe.

Photo: NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover took a selfie with the Ingenuity helicopter, seen here about 13 feet (3.9 meters) from the rover in this image taken April 6, 2021, the 46th Martian day, or sol, of the mission by the WATSON (Wide Angle Topographic Sensor for Operations and eNgineering) camera on the SHERLOC (Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals) instrument, located at the end of the rover's long robotic arm.