SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
At first glance, a new concept for a NASA habitat on Mars looks like a cross between Mark Watney's inflatable potato farm from "The Martian" and the home of Luke's Uncle Owen on Tatooine from "Star Wars."
[...] The "Mars Ice Home" is a large inflatable dome that is surrounded by a shell of water ice. NASA said the design is just one of many potential concepts for creating a sustainable home for future Martian explorers. The idea came from a team at NASA's Langley Research Center that started with the concept of using resources on Mars to help build a habitat that could effectively protect humans from the elements on the Red Planet's surface, including high-energy radiation.
Langley senior systems engineer Kevin Vipavetz who facilitated the design session said the team assessed "many crazy, out of the box ideas and finally converged on the current Ice Home design, which provides a sound engineering solution," he said.
The advantages of the Mars Ice Home is that the shell is lightweight and can be transported and deployed with simple robotics, then filled with water before the crew arrives. The ice will protect astronauts from radiation and will provide a safe place to call home, NASA says. But the structure also serves as a storage tank for water, to be used either by the explorers or it could potentially be converted to rocket fuel for the proposed Mars Ascent Vehicle. Then the structure could be refilled for the next crew.
Submitted via IRC for Bytram
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday January 04 2017, @08:44PM
On the other hand, non-water bricks don't need to be kept at uncomfortable temps to retain structural integrity.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday January 04 2017, @10:08PM
On the other-other hand - you're on Mars. Everything exposed to the ambient environment will always be far more than uncomfortably cold, including the outside of your habitat, no matter what it's made of. You're going to want a nice thick layer of insulation regardless - that may as well be inside the structure that's protecting you from sandstorms and radioactive death from above. You have to cover a lot less surface area that way thanks to the walls being several meters thick, which means a lot less stuff shipped from Earth. And can use the thermal mass to average out the daily extremes, so your insulation can be optimized against a fairly constant bone-chilling cold, rather than the daily fluctuation between pleasantly cool and "my arm just shattered" on the exposed surface.
Plus you have the advantage of readily available vacuum supplied free, which makes for incredible insulation. Make the interior of the ice dome mold out of something like IR reflective like mylar "space blanket" material, and then inflate a somewhat smaller dome "tent" inside it, while leaving a vacuum gap between them, and you'll virtually eliminate thermal transfer between the inside of the tent and the ice dome.
I agree it's not an ideal long-term solution, but it would seem to be a robust solution for establishing a "foothold" habitat to give early colonists spacious radiation shelter using almost exclusively local materials, and equipment they'd want to have available anyway (ice mining will after all be the first step in producing water for drinking, watering crops, and producing fuel for future trips back to Earth.)
And as I mentioned, it also lends itself to acting as the scaffolding for more robust structures. Heck - you could even bury your initial ice-dome in "Mars-crete"(once you figure out how to make it), and then melt the ice to enlarge your shielded dome's diameter by many meters without having to moving anything built inside. You'd still probably want to put the insulation on the inside though - for the simple reason that the dome is still going to seek thermal equilibrium with the incredibly cold ground, and insulation that can both nearly stop that thermal flow while also supporting the humongous weight of the dome is going to be a major engineering challenge. Much easier to just build an insulated floor and walls inside the dome.
And actually - ice might still have a serious advantage in terms of ease of repair. Over time the mass of the dome will almost certainly cause the ground to settle unevenly, creating cracks in the dome. With an ice dome you could potentially just (carefully!) melt the damaged section and let it re-freeze for a near-perfect fix. Patching concrete fractures in contrast is much more difficult. So long as ice is readily available, and the local environment is perpetually sub-freezing anyway, it actually has some really nice structural properties.