In June, the four-man crew will enter the hangar at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, and spend a year inside the 3D-printed building. Mars Dune Alpha is made of a slurry that looks like a neat array of soft serve ice cream before it dries, and features crew living quarters, shared living quarters, and dedicated areas for managing medical care and growing food. increase. This 1,700-square-foot space of his in Martian soil colors was designed by architectural firm BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group, and he was 3D-printed by Icon Technology.
Experiments inside the structure will focus on the physical and behavioral health challenges people encounter during long stays in space. However, 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 its first construction project on an extraterrestrial planetary body. It is carried out.
When humans return to the moon as part of NASA’s Artemis program, astronauts will first live in places like orbiting space stations, lunar landers, or inflatable surface settlements. However, the MMPACT team is gearing up to build sustainable, long-lasting structures. To avoid the high cost of transporting materials from Earth, which requires huge rocket and fuel costs, one could take regolith that already exists and turn it into a paste that can be 3D printed into thin layers and various shapes. I mean
The team’s first extraplanetary project is tentatively scheduled for the end of 2027. For that mission, a robotic arm with an excavator attached to the side of the lunar lander will sort and stack the regolith, said lead scientist Corky Clinton. Subsequent missions will focus on using semi-autonomous excavators and other machines to build blast shields surrounding living quarters, roads, greenhouses, power plants and rocket launch pads.
According to MMPACT team leader Jennifer Edmanson, the first steps toward 3D printing on the moon include using lasers or microwaves to melt the regolith. After that, it must be cooled to allow the gas to escape. Otherwise, the material can end up looking like a sponge full of holes. The material can then be printed into the desired shape. I’m still figuring out how to assemble the finished product. Edmanson says the goal is to make construction as autonomous as possible to keep astronauts out of harm’s way, but “in the future, full-scale equipment maintenance and We cannot rule out the use of humans for repairs,” he added.
One of the current challenges facing the team is how to make lunar regolith a building material strong and durable enough to protect human life. First, future Artemis missions will be near the lunar south pole, so the regolith may contain ice. And for another, NASA doesn’t have real moon dust and rock piles to experiment with, just samples taken from the Apollo 16 mission.
Therefore, the MMPACT team has to create their own synthetic version.
Edmundson keeps a bucket in his office of about a dozen combinations of what NASA expects to find on the moon. Recipes include various mixtures of basalt, calcium, iron, magnesium, and anorthite, a mineral that does not occur naturally on Earth. Edmanson suspects that the white, lustrous synthetic anorthite being developed in collaboration with the Colorado School of Mining is representative of what NASA expects to find in the lunar crust.
However, while the team feels they can do a “pretty good job” of matching regions,chemistry Mr. Clinton describes the properties of regolith as “very difficult to create geographies.”technical They are characterized by the shape of various small bone fragments, as they are formed by impacts with meteorites or anything that has hit the moon over 4 billion years. ”
