Martian Soil Can Be Easily Used To Make Bricks That Will Help Human Settlers, Study Suggests

Colonizing Mars one day is among the top space program goals of numerous nations and private organizations. Human settlers on the Red Planet means construction of dwelling places, which might have to be done on the planet itself -- if/when man reaches its surface. It would not be practical to carry each and every item, equipment, object or material from Earth. Now, a recent study has suggested that Martian soil could be made into bricks, which will make it easy for humans to settle on the planet.

According to a NASA-funded research, conducted by a team of engineers from the University of San Diego, bricks can be created from the soil of Mars by just applying pressure to compact the soil. The process does not require the help of an oven or additional ingredients.

"We demonstrated that Martian soil simulant Mars-1a can be directly compressed at ambient into a strong solid without additives, which highlights a possible aspect of complete Martian in-situ resource utilization," the authors stated in the research paper that has been published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Incidentally, the idea of using the Red Planet’s soil to create bricks for constructing habitats is not new. However, this is the first research that shows that colonizers would not need too many items to make bricks on Mars. The technique described in the new research is simple and easy and would not require astronauts to carry along complicated technology or heavy machinery to Mars.

Before this study, scientists have thought about the idea of using complex chemistry to create binding polymers with organic compounds from Mars. Earlier ideas have also included the possibility of creating nuclear-powered brick kilns to make the basic building materials.

“If this can indeed be scaled up for mass production on Mars, then I would say we are lucky,” engineer and materials scientist Yu Qiao added, as reported by New York Post.