Bricks for building settlements on Mars! ISRO and IIS create prototype ‘Space Bricks’

As Elon Musk and his Space X are busy building long-range and heavy rockets to take us to Mars, the basic problem of settlement we would face on arrival has been taken care of. The Indian Institute of Science (IISc) has developed a sustainable method by which solid bricks could be created from Marian soil, with urea and bacteria. This has been developed in collaboration with the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO).

IISc said in a press release that these ‘space bricks’ could be used in constructing structures that would facilitate human settlements on Mars. It is still yet to be seen if the ‘space bricks’ would hold up on the red planet as the soil is quite toxic and the atmosphere is mostly made up of carbon dioxide and is 100 times thinner than Earth’s.

Nevertheless, the bricks that have been made using the Martian soil, urea and bacteria have reduced porosity and is something that hasn’t been achievable when other methods were used to consolidate Martian soil into bricks.

Associate Professor, Aloke Kumar from the Department of Mechanical Engineering at IISc said that the bacteria seeps deep into the pore space using its own protein to bind the particles together which decreases porosity and leads to stronger bricks.

But the question is, how did IISc and ISRO get their hands on Martian soil in the first place? Well in reality they did not. They simply used a Martian soil simulant that was produced from Florida and the stimulant was mixed with guar gum, which is a fibre extract from the guar bean, urea and nickel chloride, along with the bacterium Sporosarcina pasteurii to create a slurry that can be poured into moulds of shape and sizes. The credit goes to Koushik Viswanathan, Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, IISc for casting the slurry.

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