Obviously Mars has oxygen - O2 even - but atmospherically this atomic duo is (almost) all bound up in carbon. Absent a greenhouse, MOXIE was supposed to get that (also getting carbon-monoxide). There's more oxygen in water, which exists in ice and (maybe) in perchlorate brines. There's oxygen gas in the atmosphere but it's very low, so I hadn't taken it seriously. Ivan Ermanoski is taking it seriously. h/t Nyrath the SF author's tech-support.
Ermanoski has crunched the numbers such that taking the ambient O2 gas would be less expensive than running electrolysis. This matters on Mars where solar irradiance is weak and whilst nobody's built a powerplant there yet. Ermanoski recommends thermal swing sorption/desorption.
In future, when Casey Handmer's built his hectare-span greenhouse, or aerogels, there the colonists can pump in their CO2 and get cheap O2 to pump back. Whilst we're still in the remote robot phase, there's no such greenhouse. In future one might consider also Zubrin's model of small prospecting camps far from the greenhouse.
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