If we’re going to go to Mars — maybe not so far off with SpaceX founder Elon Musk already planning human flights there — we’d better be ready to produce necessities when we get there.
Given that it takes nearly 300 days to reach Mars from Earth, imagine the time, the number of trips, the weight of materials to be carried and the cost to sustain even a small community. Could a better alternative be to figure out how to grow food, build houses or make fuel cells on Mars, à la Matt Damon in The Martian?
An undergraduate research team at Northwestern University (NU) is tackling the challenge of space-based manufacturing. Meet SpaceICE: a collaborative research endeavor under the guidance of Professor
David Dunand of Northwestern’s Department of Material Sciences. The undergraduates plan to test a pioneering manufacturing process on a satellite they’re currently assembling in conjunction with a team at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). The mission will launch on a NASA
CubeSat, a small cubic satellite, in 2018.
The SpaceICE instrumentation onboard, designed and built in the Materials Science Department at Northwestern University, will take an established materials fabrication approach called freeze-casting and test how the method works in near-Earth orbit. “The CubeSat is going to carry an experiment to freeze-cast silver coated glass beads,” says Krysti Scotti, the undergraduate spearheading the project, who also put together the SpaceICE student team. That team is now racing to assemble the freeze–caster and related CubeSat instrumentation in time to deliver the payload to UIUC by the beginning of next year. The UIUC team members will integrate the instruments into a CubeSat envelope and enable communication using a ground station set up to receive data from the satellite by mid-2018, before handing the entire package to NASA for an October 1, 2018, launch.