Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Space
  3. News

Scientists find a surprising way to create concrete for Mars buildings

By

If Elon Musk really wants to build an outpost on Mars for humans to live and work, visiting astronauts may have to literally give their blood, sweat, and tears — and even urine — to make it happen.

Transporting construction materials all the way to the red planet would cost be extremely costly and impractical, but scientists at the University of Manchester in England believe they may have found a workaround.

Recommended Videos

In the results of a study published recently in Materials Today Bio, the scientists discovered that by mixing a common blood plasma protein called human serum albumin with the urea waste product excreted in urine, sweat, and tears, and then blending it with simulated moon or Mars material, they were able to create a substance even stronger than concrete.

The team of scientists has called its invention AstroCrete, and believes the method could be an important step toward future Mars exploration that could see humans living and working on the faraway planet.

Dr. Aled Roberts, who was part of the University of Manchester team that worked on the research, told the university’s EurekaAlert publication that the new technique appears to offer improvements over earlier ideas for constructing buildings in environments far from Earth.

“Scientists have been trying to develop viable technologies to produce concrete-like materials on the surface of Mars, but we never stopped to think that the answer might be inside us all along,” Roberts said. Noting how blood from animals was once used to bind mortar, he added: “It’s exciting that a major challenge of the space age may have found its solution based on inspirations from medieval technology.”

The scientists said that during a two-year Mars mission, a crew of six astronauts would be able to produce more than half a ton of AstroCrete that could be used for sandbags or regolith bricks.

NASA is eyeing the 2030s for the first crewed mission to Mars, but that would be a relatively short trip to test a plethora of systems, including the transportation for getting astronauts safely back from such a distant location.

In other words, it could be some time before we see any astronauts passing water into a space-based cement mixer to build a shelter, but the University of Manchester scientists’ research is certainly a fascinating breakthrough that could well transform the thinking behind how to create our first construction site on another planet.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Trevor Mogg
Trevor Mogg
Contributing Editor
Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…
NASA has lost communication with the Ingenuity Mars helicopter
NASA’s Ingenuity Mars helicopter is seen here in a close-up taken by Mastcam-Z, a pair of zoomable cameras aboard the Perseverance rover. This image was taken on April 5, the 45th Martian day, or sol, of the mission.

The Mars helicopter Ingenuity has had a remarkable lifespan and has proven to be a greater success than anyone imagined. Originally designed to perform just five flights over the surface of Mars, the helicopter has now performed more than 70. However, NASA has now announced that it has lost contact with the helicopter, though it's unclear how serious this problem is.

The helicopter was performing its 72nd flight, which was an adjustment and correction to a previous flight that was cut short. Flight 71 was intended to be a journey of 1,175 feet (358 meters), but when the helicopter made this flight earlier in the month, it traveled just a third of that. The problem was related to its downward-facing camera, which uses surface indications for autonomous navigation. The helicopter was traveling over a particularly featureless expanse of the surface, and the lack of landmarks appeared to cause a problem with its navigation, forcing the flight to end early.

Read more
See the passing of a day on Mars with the Curiosity rover
Curiosity rover

While many of us are on vacation this week between Christmas and New Year, the Curiosity rover on Mars is getting back to work after taking time off last month. In November, NASA's Mars missions paused for two weeks during an event called the Mars solar conjunction, when the sun is directly between Earth and Mars.

That means that any communications signals passing between the two planets would have to pass close to the harsh solar environment, where they would likely be degraded. To avoid any risk of garbled communications sending dangerous signals to the rovers, NASA stopped sending commands to both its Curiosity and Perseverance rovers until the solar conjunction passed.

Read more
Mars Odyssey spacecraft pulls a sideways maneuver to capture the planet’s horizon
NASA Orbiter Snaps Stunning Views of Mars Horizon

A new image from a NASA orbiter shows an unusual view of Mars that captures the planet's horizon complete with clouds. It is similar to the kinds of views of Earth that astronauts get from the International Space Station, showing what Mars would look like if seen from a similar vantage point.

The image was taken by NASA's Mars Odyssey spacecraft, which has been orbiting the planet since 2001. In its over 20 years of operations, the orbiter made key discoveries, including some of the first detections of subsurface ice on the planet. It has also created a global map of the planet's surface using its Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) instrument.

Read more