Martian rock to provide foundation for 3D Printing 🖼
A group of scientists at Washington State University (WSU) has created a “high-performance material” that can be fed into a 3D printer using a model of Martian rock.
The researchers said in a blog post that the advancement might enable the fabrication of necessary equipment and rocket components on Mars itself, resolving several issues with the requirement to send large payloads to the Red Planet.
Amit Bandyopadhyay, a professor at WSU, stated that 3D printing must take place in space if human missions are to be considered. “We truly cannot transport everything from here,” he added. And we are unable to go back and collect anything we may have forgotten.
Space missions are constrained by the number of goods they can transport, and it is extremely expensive to do so. According to the blog article, it would cost at least $54,000 for a NASA shuttle to launch just one kilogram of cargo into Earth’s orbit, never mind sending it to Mars.
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Everything that can be produced in space or on Earth would be lighter and cheaper, and if something breaks, astronauts would need a way to fix it on the spot, according to WSU.
The titanium alloy was chosen for its strength and heat resistance, and the researchers blended it with simulated Martian rock dust, heating it with a powerful laser to nearly 2,000 degrees Celsius to produce a workable substance.
The scientists found that a blend of 5% rock and 95% alloy was both lighter and stronger than titanium alloy alone, even though a ceramic material created exclusively from Mars dust was found to break when cooled.
A slight decrease in carrying weight might result in hundreds of thousands of dollars in savings, given the amounts at stake. Likewise, in the future, new methods may be developed that enable the use of 3D printing procedures using materials that contain a greater percentage of rock that is native to Mars.
According to Bandyopadhyay, “[Our approach] provides you a superior, higher strength and hardness material, so it can perform noticeably better in particular applications.”
This shows that [developing composites suited for 3D printing] is feasible, and perhaps we should look in this direction since it’s not just generating weak plastic parts, but metal-ceramic composite parts, which are robust and can be utilized for any type of structural elements.
