A robot has used meteorite extracts from Mars to help make oxygen from water, melding artificial intelligence’s powers of chemical discovery with efforts to explore and even populate the red planet.

The automated experiment boosts the possibility of sustaining future manned outer space missions, according to the paper published on Monday in Nature Synthesis. The authors estimated that it would have taken 2,000 years of human labour to achieve the same result by trial and error.

The AI robot used the rock samples to make a catalyst — a substance that speeds up chemical reactions — to produce oxygen from water. The work, from a multidisciplinary team at the University of Science and Technology of China in the eastern city of Hefei, taps into rapidly growing interest in colonisation of the cosmos and possible exploitation of extraterrestrial resources.