Scientists from UK have developed a new construction technique which uses blood, urine and sweat for construction in Mars and Moon.
Moon and Mars bio composite | credits: University of Manchester
Scientists from UK have developed a new
construction technique in which the cosmic concrete is made from space dust and
bodily fluids of Astronauts. As this technique, doesn’t involve shipping of
building blocks from earth, it is considered to be the perfectly suited
concrete, like material for construction work in extra-terrestrial. Environments such as Moon or Mars.
This
technique seems to be cost effective on
comparing it with the cost of
bringing a brick to Mars as it may cost
around $2M. Here, the bricks for these space colonies could be produced from
construction site itself. This practice is known as In-Situ Resource Utilisation
(ISRU). The key fact is that, protein from blood plasma of human, serum albumin
is combined with urea which is also waste product found in urine, sweat and
tears. When these two are mixed with dust from Martian soil or Lunar. It results
in a much stronger material than ordinary cement that we found on earth. This
resulting material is termed as astrocrete. By adding urea, the compressive
strength of this novel material have increased by over 300% and now the
compressive strength of this material is almost 40MPa. Before adding urea the
compressive strength of the material was 25MPa.
The idea for this concept comes
from the ancient construction techniques that involved mixing of pig’s blood
into lime mortar to act as the binding material. On further investigations
conducted by the scientists revealed the underlying bonding mechanism and it was found that the blood proteins
denature or curdle thus forming a extended structure with interactions known as
beta sheets. These beta sheets tightly holds the materials together.
Scientists
stated that this technique is having
more advantages as compared to other proposed construction techniques. It is
estimated that over 500kg of high strength Astrocrete can be produced by a crew of six astronauts over the course
of a two year mission on the surface of Mars. Scientist Dr Roberts stated that
the concept is literally blood-curdling.