Despite the fact that the start of the first mission to Mars is still far away, and while we can only dream of colonizing the Red Planet, scientists are already developing various options for how to equip the fourth planet from the Sun. The main problem with colonizing Mars is the lack of oxygen. A variety of options have been proposed to solve this problem, but one of the most interesting was recently proposed by scientists from the UK. They propose to populate the planet with special bacteria that "will do everything themselves."
Experts from the University of Exeter are behind the development. According to the Daily Mail, a group of researchers relied on data that special salts were found in the Martian soil that can be processed by specially bred bacteria. Oxygen is one of the by-products of processing. The compound primarily affected by bacteria is called perchlorate and, according to available information, it makes up about 1% of all Martian soil, which is quite a lot.
Petri dish, in which the experiment on processing perchlorate was carried out.
After interacting with perchlorate, the bacteria breaks it down into its constituent parts, and the oxygen released during the reaction can be easily collected. According to the project's chief scientific director, Professor John Love,
Vladimir Kuznetsov