How to produce iron on Mars

Aug. 5 () –

A team of researchers, led by Professor Akbar Rhamdhani of Swinburne University, has published the first detailed study of metal production on another planet.

The team focuses on mining for metals on Mars. They are developing a process that would take processed air, soil and sunlight on Mars to create metallic iron. It uses concentrated solar energy as a source of heat and carbon, which is produced by cooling CO gas, which is a byproduct of oxygen production in the Martian atmosphere. Publish your design in Acta Astronautica.

This oxygen production has been demonstrated on Mars, on the Perseverance rover, through NASA’s MOXIE (Mars Oxygen In Situ Resource Utilization Experiment) project. Therefore, the Swinburne metal extraction process is intended to be combined with a future oxygen generating plant (much larger than MOXIE) to co-produce oxygen and iron alloys, which can be used to create metals. This can be used to promote human mission and development on Mars.

Launching technology into space is expensive, time-consuming and bad for the environment. The production of resources from other planets allows a more efficient, economic and sustainable development in space.

This allows for further human exploration and the spread of technology, such as satellites, that help collect data and solve problems on Earth.

The Fluid and Process Dynamics Research Group team and the Space Technology and Industry Institute at Swinburne are currently working closely with CSIRO Minerals and the CSIRO Space Technology Future Science Platform (the Australian research agency) to take the investigation to the next stage.

Professor Akbar Rhamdhani says: “We would like to develop a metal extraction process on Mars that actually uses in-situ resources.without bringing reagents from Earth, to support further human mission and development on Mars.

“If you wanted to build something big on Mars without having to pay to launch everything from Earth – large satellites, Mars colonies, refueling depots and more – this could be a very valuable process.”