Imagine you are an astronaut orbiting the Earth. Suddenly, an alert flashes on your display. The air system on your spaceship has failed. You and your crewmates must work with mission control to fix it quickly.
This is a real problem for astronauts on the International Space Station. They need oxygen to breathe. But storing oxygen on their spaceship is not enough. They also need to remove the bad air they breathe out.
Astronauts need about 0.8 kilograms of oxygen each day. Early space missions stored oxygen in tanks. But this is not enough for long space missions. So, engineers developed a new system to make oxygen from water.
This system uses a device called an electrolyzer. It breaks down water into oxygen and hydrogen gases. But it's hard to get the oxygen out of the water in space.
Now, researchers are working on a new system. It uses magnets to separate the oxygen from the water. This system is called Magnetohydrodynamic Oxygen Generation Assembly, or MOGA.
