NASA’s first-place winning design for Martian living is an igloo made by robots.
Following the hot opening weekend for “The Martian,” NASA has a cool idea for Martian living: ice homes built by robots.
A team of designers has created a NASA award-winning concept for human housing on Mars. Since it has long been known that Mars contains large ice deposits, the team has posited triangular ice homes built solely by robots, according to a Wired story.
The design team of eight people from the firms Clouds Architecture Office (Clouds AO) and Space Exploration Architecture (SEArch) were recently awarded first place in a NASA-sponsored competition for human habitation of Mars.
The design includes a double-walled structure with opaque ice walls to give inhabitants more light as they near the exterior, creating what the designers call a “contemplative yard” near the edges. The idea is to give the astronauts an illusion of the outdoors, to enhance their psychological well-being during their time on Mars.
The team also suggested that the ice homes would be built beyond the Martian equator, where temperatures remain low and the planet is always frozen. There, robots can use the sub-surface ice, with one robot designed for unearthing the ice and another for sculpting into the structure. The task will involve pressuring the ice into water, then 3D-printing it while re-freezing it in the chilly atmosphere.
The Phoenix Mars Lander, left behind on Mars in 2008, would supply the power needed for the robotic construction.
Leave a Reply