The Mars rover Perseverance captured a dust devil moving across the rim of a crater. A robot chemist powered by artificial intelligence could solve the puzzle of providing oxygen to humans on Mars, according to the results of a new study. The study, published in Nature Synthesis, found that an AI robot could quickly figure out how to cook up vital oxygen for survival compared to humans, who would take a lifetime to complete such a task. The reason, according to the paper, is there are more than a million potential oxygen evolution reaction (OER) catalysts on Mars, which would give humans too many possibilities to work with when trying to create oxygen. Adding to the problem would be communication with Earth to solve the problems, with transmissions taking as long as 20 minutes to travel between the home planet and Mars.

Commercial spaceflight companies like SpaceX have made space travel more accessible, and allow more research for future missions to the moon and Mars, astronauts said. A robotic space chemist could create oxygen on Mars using materials from the planet's surface, Chinese researchers behind the project say. A refrigerator-sized machine equipped with artificial intelligence and a robotic arm broke down material from five meteorites and analyzed it to identify a chemical formula that creates a substance that can cause oxygen to separate from water. Researchers said it would have taken a human 2,000 years to find that formula. WHAT IS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI)?