Martian concrete made from materials only on the Red planet A trio of researchers with Northwestern

Martian concrete made from materials only on the Red planet

A trio of researchers with Northwestern University has created a type of concrete made only from materials found on Mars, which suggests it could be used as a building material for those who make the journey to the Red planet sometime in the distant future. The trio, Lin Wan, Roman Wendner and Gianluca Cusatis, have written a paper describing their efforts and results and have posted it on the preprint server arXiv.

Many countries and consortiums have been looking into the possibility of not only sending humans to Mars, but of establishing a presence there—perhaps even building a permanent colony. But there are many obstacles that must be overcome first, one of which is figuring out how to build a place to live on the planet without having to carry the materials for it—a tricky problem when noting the barren terrain. In this new effort, the research trio looked into the possibility of making concrete out of only material available on Mars, and notably, without the need for water, which is always used to make concrete here on Earth.

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