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NASA Designs 'Ice Dome' For Astronauts On Mars (phys.org)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: 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. 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. Other concepts had astronauts living in caves, or underground, or in dark, heavily shielded habitats. The team said the Ice Home concept balances the need to provide protection from radiation, without the drawbacks of an underground habitat. The design maximizes the thickness of ice above the crew quarters to reduce radiation exposure while also still allowing light to pass through ice and surrounding materials.
I still think they need to look into solar sintering based glass fiber production. Sinterable dust is all over on mars, and already loaded with melt temp reducing salts. The median bulk composition of Martian dust needs to be released for materials research, to see if viable glasses can be produced this way. (You just need a bead of glass and a centrifuge to spin off glass fiber. Even with the lower light levels, this should be doable on Mars. That gives the raw material for sandbag based habitat construction.)
So far though, I have yet to see a good bulk mineral assay of martian dust, only formulations for simulants that simulate texture for landings. That is not useful for evaluating glass quality for fiber production.
The martian water tends to be 2 kinds:
So saline that it will literally burn your skin off on contact (because it is basically bleach).
Frozen, and buried under a lot of overburden.
The first kind avoids sublimation and freezing due to its high salinity. It is useless for astronaut/colonist use. Would require extensive reprocessing to be made useful. Not cheap.
The second kind avoids sublimation due to the pressure exerted by the overburden, and the frigid deep soil temperatures of Mars. Mining it requires removal of the overburden (strip mining), which is not cheap. Once exposed, it will begin sublimating immediately. A great deal will be lost to this form of evaporation, and the mine strip will be geologically unstable, due to the volatility of the ice. Not cheap.
Putting dirt into sandbags? Potentially very cheap.
... I do have to admit, this one seems the best thought out (it's been covered here on Slashdot before). The level of detail that they went into on their work was impressive, on every front. Some of the unique concepts are rather interesting, such as having the outer ice shell shaped as a fresnel lens, thus concentrating sunlight to higher levels in the interior. I also like the nested aspects of it - providing a large uninsulated (but pressurized) staging yard (quite useful, particularly once you start ramping up ISRU and need room for lots of industrial systems and feedstock/output stockpiles), and an insulated greenhouse/courtyard around the primary shelter (nice thought toward human factors, as well as small scale agriculture). Having the primary shelter be constructed on Earth and simply landed (with its interior space initially filled up with the hardware needed to make the outer radiation protection / pressure shell) hits all the right buttons as well. Having the "printer" slide along grooves in the shell it sprays out is also a lot more elegant of a design than many other potential alternatives.
Still, there's a massive amount of engineering and testing that would be needed to make such a thing. And a lot of in-situ demo missions as well for each aspect of the technology, especially the (no hardware design given) vaporization-based water recovery system, but up to and including a small scale inflate-and-print testbed.
For the love of Crom, am I the only one here who wants to keep the U.S. technologically competitive?