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Like any complicated recipe, whipping up Martian soil on Earth requires finding the right ingredients. You can raid a museum to find an extremely rare mineral or call your local coal supplier for a pinch of magnetite.
Put it together in just the right quantities with the rest, and the result is an imitation very close to the ground on Mars. This is the kind of thing that organizations like NASA claim – if you do it right.
And as the world turns its attention to the colonization of Mars, it will take some of the dust of the red planet.
This special recipe is exactly what scientists at the University of Central Florida have perfected, creating what is now in jars in a small, harmless laboratory inside the school: brown soil with an auburn hue and orange spots. Like the real stuff, it's downright reddish.
"We basically take minerals, as pure as possible, we mix them up, a little bit of that and a pinch of that, and follow the recipe," said Daniel Britt, professor of physics and global science at UCF. the Exolith laboratory of the school. "Curiously, if you follow the recipe, it ends up looking a lot like what is happening abroad. The right color, the right texture, the good properties. "
Britt and his team are now selling Martian land and developing two other types. They also created four variants of asteroid dust and two of lunar dirt, all sold for $ 20 a kilo to a host of customers, including the Kennedy Space Center, NASA, the European Space Agency and several private companies. The soil is used in various experiments ranging from crops to testing robots and instruments for future missions deeper in space.
"[NASA] I hate talking about anyone dying, but that's it: you want to make sure your equipment and procedures work before you go, "said Britt. "It's a way to do it with more confidence … It makes things cheaper, [and] dying bat. "
Certainly, UCF is not the only place where we make foreign impurities. About a dozen others around the world, including Japanese and Chinese universities and private companies, currently produce them to varying degrees of loyalty and commercial availability.
According to Britt, their local development contributes to the Space Coast's long-term goal of becoming more than just a launching site.
"There are more things on the coast of space," he said. "So we are trying to make the intellectual adventure at UCF a richer experience for our students and the people of Central Florida. "
In fact, a NASA contract brought UCF to perfect revenue in 2015. The school worked in partnership with the space technology company Deep Space Industries, which is committed to developing five tons of four Soil variants of asteroids.
Since the end of the contract at the end of June, UCF has continued its efforts alone. Up to now, he has filled orders between $ 60 and $ 9,800 for his replicated soils, called in the lab by their official name: simulating regolith.
At the Kennedy Space Center's Regimental Mechanics and Crop Mechanics Laboratory, scientists are using UCF's asteroids ground to test excavator technologies and asteroid extraction techniques. The lab is also testing potential conditions for launching platforms at sites such as Mars and the moon.
For the moment, he is using the five tons of asteroid soil that NASA has bought, but he also hopes to later try UCF's Lunar and Martian variants for his experiments, said Jim Mantovani, a laboratory physicist.
"One can think of the regolith simulators as a form of technological development that NASA needs to provide a ramp to access other space technologies, say excavation technologies," Mantovani said. . "You can not develop a good excavator for the moon before having a good lunar simulator."
Perfect the recipe
But how to make sure that the recreated dirt is close enough to reality?
Britt and Kevin Cannon, a postdoctoral researcher who also works at the Exolith Laboratory of UCF, have used their expertise to work on several Mars rover missions in order to refine their product. They relied heavily on Curiosity robot data, which used X-rays to extract soil mineralogy from Mars to determine their ingredients. Then they began to explore the planet.
In Martian soil, for example, there are things like olivine, which is used in peridot of green gemstone, and magnetite, used in coal washing. And they can be hard to find.
The composition of the Earth has been profoundly altered because of its interaction with life, so places like Mars, the moon and asteroids are composed of fundamentally different ways. The minerals in their soils exist on Earth – but you will never find them together.
A major mineral in asteroids, for example, called cronstedtite, is extremely rare and can only be found in large quantities in museum collections. That's why the UCF team raided the geology museum of the Colorado School.
But once they are together, the ingredients feel like real things, and most importantly, they act that way.
Volcanic rocks, for example, have been used for lunar experiments because they mimic the texture of the moon's ground, but they do not reach other properties, said Britt.
Using the right ground, as close to reality as possible, is essential to accelerate the achievement of the goal of NASA and other parties to return to the moon – and soon to Mars.
"If you're serious about mining asteroids, exploring Mars or the lunar surface, you'll need better scientific fidelity on the surface to design your experiences." said Britt. "We reduce the number of surprises you get when you come to what is actually a foreign environment."
Want more news from the space? Follow Go For Launch on Facebook. Contact the reporter at [email protected] or 407-420-5660; Twitter @ChabeliH
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