Mars likely to have enough oxygen to support life:

[beecee]

https://phys.org/news/2018-10-mars-oxygen-life.html

alty water just below the surface of Mars could hold enough oxygen to support the kind of microbial life that emerged and flourished on Earth billions of years ago, researchers reported Monday.

In some locations, the amount of oxygen available could even keep alive a primitive, multicellular animal such as a sponge, they reported in the journal Nature Geosciences.

"We discovered that brines"—water with high concentrations of salt—"on Mars can contain enough oxygen for microbes to breathe," said lead author Vlada Stamenkovic, a theoretical physicist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.

"This fully revolutionises our understanding of the potential for life on Mars, today and in the past," he told AFP.

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2018-10-mars-oxygen-life.html#jCp

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the paper:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-018-0243-0

O2 solubility in Martian near-surface environments and implications for aerobic life:

 

Abstract

Due to the scarcity of O2 in the modern Martian atmosphere, Mars has been assumed to be incapable of producing environments with sufficiently large concentrations of O2 to support aerobic respiration. Here, we present a thermodynamic framework for the solubility of O2 in brines under Martian near-surface conditions. We find that modern Mars can support liquid environments with dissolved O2 values ranging from ~2.5 × 10−6 mol m−3 to 2 mol m−3 across the planet, with particularly high concentrations in polar regions because of lower temperatures at higher latitudes promoting O2 entry into brines. General circulation model simulations show that O2concentrations in near-surface environments vary both spatially and with time—the latter associated with secular changes in obliquity, or axial tilt. Even at the limits of the uncertainties, our findings suggest that there can be near-surface environments on Mars with sufficient O2 available for aerobic microbes to breathe. Our findings may help to explain the formation of highly oxidized phases in Martian rocks observed with Mars rovers, and imply that opportunities for aerobic life may exist on modern Mars and on other planetary bodies with sources of O2independent of photosynthesis.

[tinkerer]

What might the Oxygen content of the great variety of minerals present in the rocks and surface of Mars be regarding it's extraction?  

Edited November 18, 2018 by tinkerer

[mistermack]

Water is rocky on Mars. There's lots of it as ice, from what I've read. So if you want to extract oxygen, water is probably the best source. 

There are oxide minerals on Mars. Apparently the source of free oxygen is the action of the solar radiation on CO2 high in the atmosphere. That's something I didn't know. Now I just want to know where the CO2 comes from. I suppose there is still some outgassing going on. Mars used to have active volcanoes, so it probably had a much thicker atmosphere in the past.

[Phi for All]

!

Moderator Note

Posts regarding Earth creatures who don't need oxygen split off to here.

 

[7he4uthor]

Perhaps Myxomycetes/Mycetozoa Moulds and Slime molds Myxomycete plasmodia have also been used to study the genetics of asexual cell fusion