JAKARTA – Human efforts to colonize Mars in the future seem to be getting easier. The reason, a number of scientists from Australia managed to find a way to produce metallic iron on the red planet.
Sputnik News reported that the findings would be of great value if future expeditions to Mars were carried out and humans attempted to construct structures there without needing to rely on shipping raw materials from Earth.
Future manned expeditions to Mars will need to have a way to generate the resources they need on-site, as supplying such missions from Earth can be expensive and problematic, given the distance between the two planets.
A team of scientists from Swinburne University of Technology in Australia has found a way to help with this problem by devising a method to produce metallic iron on the red planet.
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The method proposed by the team involved uses carbon “sourced from quenching carbon monoxide produced by electrolysis of CO2 from the Martian atmosphere” as a reducing agent to extract iron from Martian regolite via a carbothermic reaction.
Last year, NASA’s Mars rover Perseverance performed CO2 electrolysis during an experimental procedure intended to produce oxygen from CO2 on Mars, and the research team hopes that their metal extraction process can be linked to an oxygen production plant, as Mining points out. com.
Lead researcher Akbar Rhamdhani stated in a statement that their intention was to “develop a metal extraction process on Mars that actually utilizes the in-situ resources — without bringing reactants from the earth.”
“If you want to build something big on Mars without having to pay to launch everything from Earth – think big satellites, Martian colonies, refueling depots and more – this can be a very worthwhile process,” added Rhamdhani.
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