How NASA plans to melt the Moon and build on Mars

Featured Sponsor

Store	Link	Sample Product
UK Artful Impressions	Premiere Etsy Store

In June, a crew of four will enter a hangar at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, and spend a year inside a 3D-printed building. Made from a paste that, before drying, looked like neatly arranged lines of soft serve ice cream, Mars Dune Alpha has crew quarters, shared living space, and dedicated areas for managing medical care and growing food. The 1,700-square-foot space, which is the color of Martian soil, was designed by architecture firm BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group and 3D-printed by Icon Technology.

Experiments inside the structure will focus on the physical and behavioral health challenges people will face during long-term residences in space. But it is also the first structure built for a NASA mission by the Moon to Mars Planetary Autonomous Construction Technology (MMPACT) team, which is now preparing for the first construction projects on a planetary body beyond Earth. Land.

When humanity returns to the moon as part of NASA artemis program, astronauts will first live in places like an orbiting space station, on a lunar lander, or in inflatable surface habitats. But the MMPACT team is preparing for the construction of sustainable and durable structures. To avoid the high cost of shipping material from Earth, which would require massive rockets and fuel expenses, that means using the regolith that’s already there, turning it into a paste that can be 3D printed in thin layers or in different shapes.

The team’s first off-planet project is tentatively scheduled for late 2027. For that mission, a robotic arm with an excavator, which will attach to the side of a lunar lander, will sort and stack the regolith, says principal investigator Corky. Clinton. Subsequent missions will focus on using semi-autonomous excavators and other machines to build homes, roads, greenhouses, power plants, and blast shields that will surround rocket launch pads.

The first step toward 3D printing on the moon will involve using lasers or microwaves to melt the regolith, says MMPACT team leader Jennifer Edmunson. It must then be cooled to allow the gases to escape; failure to do so can leave the material riddled with holes like a sponge. The material can then be printed in the desired shapes. It is still being decided how to assemble the finished pieces. To keep astronauts out of harm’s way, Edmunson says the goal is to make the build as autonomous as possible, but adds: “I can’t rule out using humans to maintain and repair our equipment on a large scale in the future.”

One of the challenges facing the team now is how to turn lunar regolith into a building material strong and durable enough to protect human life. For one, since future Artemis missions will be near the moon’s south pole, the regolith could contain ice. And then again, it’s not like NASA has lots of actual moon dust and rocks to experiment with, just samples from the Apollo 16 mission.

So the MMPACT team has to make their own synthetic versions.

Edmunson keeps buckets in his office with about a dozen combinations of what NASA hopes to find on the moon. The recipes include various mixtures of basalt, calcium, iron, magnesium, and a mineral called anorthite that does not occur naturally on Earth. Edmunson suspects that the bright white synthetic anorthite he is developing in collaboration with the Colorado School of Mining is representative of what NASA hopes to find in the lunar crust.

However, while the team feels it can do a “reasonably good job” of matching the geochemical properties of the regolith, Clinton says, “it’s very difficult to make the geotechnical properties, the shape of the different tiny pieces of aggregate, because they are built up by collisions with meteorites and whatever has hit the moon for 4 billion years.”