Manufacturing Bricks From Simulated Martian Soil

All those explorers that plan to settle down on Mars and make it home, may soon be able to built homes there with red soil present on the planet without any oven or any other extra ingredient. The only thing you will need is to apply some extra pressure to compact the soil or some equal pressure blow with a hammer. The findings for the same were recently published in a famous journal. The study was carried out by a team of engineers working at the University of California located in San Diego.

It was sponsored by NASA as its significance has been raised since a new bill has been passed by Congress under President Donald Trump’s rule, it has directed NASA to send a manned mission to Mars anyhow by the year 2033. A professor of structural engineering at the UC San Diego and also the lead author of this paper, Yu Qiao, adds, “The people who will go to Mars will be incredibly brave. They will be pioneers. And I would be honored to be their brick maker.”

Manufacturing Bricks From Simulated Martian Soil

Though proposals like these are not new as several attempts were already made to send manned missions to this planet. However, this new technology will ensure that they will need to carry less baggage with them. The previous plans included in this strategy had nuclear-powered brick kilns or making use of complicated chemistry for turning organic compounds that are found on Mars for binding polymers with each other.

Initially, the team’s endeavour was just to bring down the quantity of polymers needed to give shape to Martian soil and turn it into bricks. This process was discovered accidently. Only two steps were needed to turn Martian soil into bricks without any simulant. The first one was to enclose this simulant into a flexible container and next was to compact this simulant into required high pressure. The amount of pressure needed for this small sized sample was roughly equal to someone dropping a 10-lbs hammer from a height of a meter.