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. Consisting of a mush that, before it dried, looked like neatly laid out rows of soft ice, Mars Dune Alpha has quarters for the crew, a shared living space and spaces dedicated to the administration of care. medicine and food culture. 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 issues that people will encounter during long-term residencies 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 currently preparing for the first construction projects on a planetary body beyond Earth.
When mankind 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 durable and long-lasting structures. To avoid the high cost of shipping material from Earth, which would require massive rockets and fuel expenditure, that means using the regolith that’s already there, turning it into a paste that can be 3D printed in layers. thin or in different shapes.
The team’s first off-planet project is tentatively scheduled for late 2027. For this mission, a robotic arm with an excavator, which will be attached to the side of a lunar lander, will sort and stack regolith, the principal investigator explains. Corky Clinton. Subsequent missions will focus on using semi-autonomous excavators and other machinery to construct living quarters, roads, greenhouses, power plants, and blast shields that will surround the launch pads of rockets.
The first step towards 3D printing on the moon will be to use lasers or microwaves to melt the regolith, says MMPACT team leader Jennifer Edmunson. Then it must cool 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 into the desired shapes. How to assemble the finished pieces is still being decided. To keep astronauts out of harm’s way, Edmunson says the goal is to make construction as self-sufficient as possible, but she adds, “I can’t rule out the use of humans to maintain and repair our large-scale equipment at the future.”
One of the challenges the team now faces is how to turn lunar regolith into a building material strong and durable enough to protect human life. For one thing, since future Artemis missions will be close to the moon’s south pole, the regolith could contain ice. And on the other hand, it’s not like NASA has mounds of real dust and moon rocks to experiment with, just samples from the Apollo 16 mission.
The MMPACT team must therefore create its own synthetic versions.
Edmunson keeps buckets in his office of about a dozen suits of what NASA expects to find on the moon. The recipes include various mixtures of basalt, calcium, iron, magnesium, and a mineral called anorthite which does not occur naturally on Earth. Edmunson suspects that the shiny, white synthetic anorthite developed in conjunction with the Colorado School of Mining is representative of what NASA expects to find in the lunar crust.
Still, while the team feels it can do a “reasonably good job” of matching the geochemical properties of regolith, says Clinton, “it is very difficult to render the geotechnical properties, the shape of the different little pieces of aggregate, because they’re built by collisions with meteorites and whatever hit the moon over 4 billion years.