May 5, 2021: -A filtration materials company that watched its stock increase between the need for protective gear to guard against Covid-19 is testing ways to make breathing possible on the planet Mars.

Lydall, which the federal government contracted to help replenish the U.S. stockpile of personal protection equipment, supplied the National Aeronautics and Space Administration with HEPA-grade filtration media, which is being used to produce oxygen on Mars, according to CEO Sara Greenstein.

“We’re not only trying to protect people and the environment on Earth, but we’re also beginning to do it on Mars too,” Greenstein told CNBC’ on Monday.

NASA was on national headlines after landing the six-wheel rover Perseverance on Mars in February. The rover is equipped with filtration media made by Lydall, which studies ways to convert carbon dioxide to oxygen that can help the human beings who travel to that planet in the future.

Greenstein said that Lydall’s HEPA-grade filtration media, called the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment (MOXIE) module, is installed on the rover to converts the carbon dioxide to oxygen which is showing some success.

“What the MOXIE module is walking around the Mars surface filtering all of the CO2 out of the Martian air and trying to convert into oxygen so that for future human-crewed landings, we wouldn’t have to bring stored oxygen up. And it’s working,” she said.”

According to the press release, last month, NASA announced that it ran the first of several tests using MOXIE, designed to generate nearly 20 minutes of breathable oxygen per hour for astronauts. Shares of the company rose on Monday, trading to $37.11, putting the stock up more than 23% this year.