Breathing oxygen on Mars is already possible.

Scientists at the MIT Massachusetts Institute of Technology have managed to create a mechanism that gets oxygen from the Martian atmosphere, called the Mars In Situ Oxygen Resource Utilization Experiment or MOXIE for its acronym in English.

Souce wikipedia.org

It is not a theoretical mechanism, it is real and they have tested it on Mars since it is one of the equipment carried by the Perseverance Rover, while on Earth oxygen represents 21% of the air, Martian air is composed almost exclusively of carbon dioxide up to 95.3%. there is 2.7% nitrogen, 1.7% argon and the rest are traces of oxygen and noble gases.

So if we tried to breathe Martian air we would simply die of suffocation due to lack of oxygen, but the oxygen exists is in carbon dioxide whose molecule is made up of one carbon atom and two oxygen atoms, what the MOXIE does is break down that molecule and in this way obtain the valuable oxygen, something he has been doing in seven experiments carried out since April 2021 about two months after landing on the red planet.

The scientists tested the device in different environmental conditions, different seasons of the Martian year and during the day and night. In the end, the MOXIE showed that it works perfectly in each experiment. The instrument reached its objective of producing 6 grams of oxygen per hour, which is approximately the rate of a tree of modest size here on earth.

Scientists want to send an enlarged version of MOXIE to Mars before sending a human mission, in order to produce oxygen at a rate similar to that of a small forest of several hundred trees, which would be enough to sustain the human expedition. and provide fuel to the rocket that allows astronauts to leave Mars.

MOXIE's production of oxygen on Mars seems like a modest step in space exploration, but it represents the first such demonstration of off-earth, in-situ resource utilization that power is, in this case harvesting and using the materials of a planet or a moon to generate the necessary resources for ships, systems, robots or humans; getting oxygen on Mars has been - a small step for MOXIE, but a big step for the lungs of all humanity -.

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