Researchers have successfully produced iron in Mars-like conditions, opening the door to metal production beyond Earth.
The vision of establishing settlements on Mars has captured the imagination of billionaires, government space programs.
Building such colonies requires vast amounts of material, and transporting it all from Earth is not practical. To put it in perspective, sending NASA’s one-ton Perseverance Rover to Mars cost around US$243 million.
Clearly, unless we plan to build a settlement fit only for ants, far more resources will be necessary. The challenge then becomes: how do we obtain them?
“Sending metals to Mars from Earth might be feasible, but it’s not economical. Can you imagine bringing tonnes of metals to Mars? It’s just not practical,” Dr Nababan says.
“Instead, we can use what’s available on Mars. It’s called in-situ resource utilization, or ISRU.”
Mars has all the ingredients needed to make native metals. This includes iron-rich oxides in regolith and carbon from its thin atmosphere, which acts as a reducing agent.
Swinburne University of Technology astrometallurgist, Professor Akbar Rhamdhani, is working with Dr Nababan to test this process with regolith simulant – an artificial recreation of the stuff found of Mars.
“We picked a simulant with very similar properties to that found at Gale Crater on Mars and processed them on Earth with simulated Mars conditions. This gives us a good idea of how the process would perform off-world,” he says.
The simulant is placed inside a chamber at Mars surface pressure and heated at increasing temperatures. The experiments showed pure iron metal formation around 1000°C, with liquid silicon-iron alloys produced around 1400°C.
