18.12.2025
Astronauts could theoretically harness frozen water on the Red Planet to construct habitats and research stations, new analysis suggests
NEW ORLEANS—Traveling to Mars, one of President Donald Trump’s stated goals for NASA astronauts, may be the easy part. If astronauts want to stay a while after landing, they’ll need to construct protective habitats that allow them to sleep, conduct research, and remain healthy and sane. Now, researchers have given some scientific credibility to a creative idea that may solve all of these problems: ice.
More than 5 million cubic kilometers of frozen water exists on or near Mars’s surface, with far more predicted to lie beneath. If the Red Planet’s ice proves obtainable, future astronauts could see themselves living in a world out of Disney’s Frozen, scientists reported here today at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union. Through various modeling exercises, the team showed the material could be molded into well-insulated, durable structures that effectively shield earthlings from the Sun’s harmful rays.
It’s “a very intriguing idea,” says Valentina Sumini, a space architecture researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was not involved in the study. A main roadblock to extraterrestrial colonization is the vast number of trips required to transport supplies from Earth, she notes. Any way to minimize that, she says, could speed the habitation of alien worlds.
Mars contains two potential building blocks for habitats: ice and regolith, the planet’s surface layer of dust and tiny bits of rock. Regolith isn’t ideal, as huge quantities would need to be sifted for elements such as silicon and oxygen. These would then be heated to high temperatures and manufactured into materials like glass, notes Robin Wordsworth, a planetary scientist at Harvard University. So his team chose ice. Our own planet provided inspiration, says Rafid Quayum, a former undergraduate student of Wordsworth’s who led the work and is now a systems engineer at an R&D center: Iceland is famous for its steely blue ice caves, which formed as Earth’s heat melted rivers of ice that carved their way out.
Instead of caves, the ice habitats considered for Mars are traditionally modeled as domes, each about 1 hectare in size with different chambers for living and agriculture. To assess the practicality of such structures, Quayum and colleagues began by mathematically modeling ice’s role as an insulator, determining that a layer a few meters thick could raise internal temperatures from about –120°C—common on Mars—to –20°C. That’s hardly balmy, but cold enough to keep the ice stable.
Next, the team modeled ice’s structural properties, noting previous work that found that doping it with organic materials such as hydrogels—water-rich polymer chains—could increase its stress resistance and flexibility, both essential building qualities. The scientists also analyzed how to keep the ice structures from dissipating into the martian atmosphere because of sublimation, when a solid transitions directly into a gas: Adding a water-resistant coating would do the trick, they found, though it would likely need to be brought from Earth.
Most important, the researchers modeled how frozen water would reflect or let in the sunlight Mars receives. Ice yielded a crucial advantage over other available materials such as regolith: It largely blocks ultraviolet wavelengths of light while letting through visible and infrared ones. That means ice habitats would protect humans from the Sun’s damaging ionizing radiation while still welcoming in light and heat—essential for photosynthesis and astronauts’ physical and psychological health.
An ice city has major limitations, however. For one, vast quantities would be required. The researchers’ initial calculations suggest about 15 square meters (as large as a parking space) could be processed per day using a power source equivalent to that of the International Space Station. Mars also experiences frequent dust storms; dust that settles on the ice would block its transparency and insulating benefits, notes Adomas Valantinas, a postdoctoral planetary scientist at ETH Zürich who has studied the uses of ice and dust on Mars but was not involved in the new analysis. And to get the ice out of the ground in the first place, drilling systems and other equipment from Earth would be required, Sumini says.
Still, “It’s important to be thinking about space exploration in the medium term, as well as just what we’re going to be doing in the next few years,” Wordsworth says. His team envisions a world where ice processing uses only the waste heat from solar or nuclear energy operations already built on the surface for long-term extraterrestrial societies.
Sumini thinks martian dwellings are only one application for the planet’s ice. Her own research has examined using frozen water to support hydroponic farming, as well as growing algae cells as potential food, as examples. Ice is “really the beginning of a possible extension of our life on another planet,” she says.
Quelle: AAAS