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Life on Mars

NASA announced the finalists in 3-D Printed Habitat Challenge to develop concepts that take advantage of the 3-D printing to imagine what habitats on Mars might look like.

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  • 29 October 2015
  • New York

NASA awarded three teams finalists in 3-D Printed Habitat Challenge. 

The competition challenged participants to develop architectural concepts that take advantage of the unique capabilities 3-D printing offers to imagine what habitats on Mars might look like using this technology and in-situ resources.

The competition is part of NASA’s Centennial Challenges program and is managed by America Makes, a partnership of organizations focused on accelerating capabilities and adoption of additive manufacturing technology.

Team SEArch/Clouds Architecture Office, Ice House. First Place. Ice House is born from the imperative to bring light and a connection to the outdoors into the vocabulary of Martian architecture – to create protected space in which the mind and body will not just survive, but thrive. With water as the core resource for future outposts on extraterrestrial bodies, NASA has taken a “follow the water” approach to exploration; Ice House extends that concept to construction. The innovative structure draws on the abundance of water and persistently low temperatures in Mars’ northern latitudes to create a multi-layered pressurized radiation shell of ice that encloses a lander habitat and gardens within. A unique 3D printing technique harnesses the physics of water and its phase transition to construct Ice House
Team Gamma, awarded with the Second Place, People’s Choice Award. A semi-autonomous multi-robot regolith additive manufacturing (RAM) system is used to create a protective in situ shield around a modular inflatable hab. The proposal primarily explores system and design redundancy through distributed functionality: from the initial descent and navigation of the three inflatable dodecohedral modules to find a suitable location; with the flexible and interchangeable internal habitat design; through to the multi-robot microwave regolith melting. Even more fundamentally, allowing for unknown outcomes acknowledges the uncertainty in the frontier environment and the mission, shown in the freedom of the deployment, the module arrangement, and construction process.
Team: LavaHive, awarded with the Third Place. LavaHive is a modular, additive-manufactured Martian habitat design using a proposed novel ‘lava-casting’ construction technique as well as utilizing recycled spacecraft materials and structures. Our design incorporates usually discarded components as a key element of the habitat concept. The back shell of the Entry, Descent and Landing (EDL) system that will deliver the construction rovers will be used for the primary habitat roof, with an inflatable module underneath as the primary living habitat. Using the readily available Martian regolith, two rovers will use a combination of sintering and ‘lava-casting’ to build connecting corridors and sub-habitats around the main inflatable section. These sub-habitats will then be fitted, sealed internally with epoxy and furnished as a research area, workshop or greenhouse depending on the mission design.
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