If you are planning to build a house on Mars, the scientists have made it easy for you for they have created a concrete-like material comprising extraterrestrial dust, blood and sweat… you read it right!
Transporting even a single brick to Mars can prove to be very expensive. As much as an estimated US$2 million. This means the future Martian colonists will not be able to transport construction materials with them and will have to utilise whatever resources they can get on-site to build a shelter.
Manchester University scientists have demonstrated that a common protein from blood plasma (human serum albumin), could act as a binder for simulated dust on the moon or on Mars, and produce a concrete-like material as a result.
According to an article published in the journal Materials Today Bio, this new production of novel material, which is being called AstroCrete, is said it have compressive strengths as high as 25 MPa (Megapascals), about the same as the 20-32 MPa seen in ordinary concrete.
Additionally, the scientists say they could further increase the compressive strength by more than 300 per cent.
How? Incorporating urea, found in the biological waste that the body produces and excretes through urine, sweat and tears, can make the concrete the best performing material having a compressive strength of almost 40 MPa. It is substantially stronger than ordinary concrete.
The new technique holds considerable advantages over many other proposed construction techniques on the moon and Mars, said Dr Aled Roberts, from the varsity, who worked on the project.
“Scientists have been trying to develop viable technologies to produce concrete-like materials on the surface of Mars, but we never stopped to think that the answer might be inside us all along,” he said.
The team calculated that over 500 kg of high-strength AstroCrete could be produced over the course of a two-year mission on the surface of Mars by a crew of six astronauts.
If used as a mortar for sandbags or heat-fused regolith bricks, each crew member could produce enough AstroCrete to expand the habitat to support an additional crew member, doubling the housing available with each successive mission.
Animal blood was historically used as a binder for mortar. “It is exciting that a major challenge of the space age may have found its solution based on inspirations from medieval technology,” said Roberts.
The team investigated the underlying bonding mechanism and found that the blood proteins denature, or “curdle,” to form an extended structure with interactions known as “beta sheets” that tightly holds the material together.
