NASA is designing an igloo style “Ice Home” for astronauts to live in when they finally go to Mars.
Living in an igloo on Mars could provide a far more sizeable, flexible and cost-effective workspace than many other proposals. Since the materials to build an “Ice Home” are already on Mars, far less material would have to be shipped from Earth.
“Ice Home is more than just a habitat, since what we really need is a new home on Mars,” Dr. Kevin Kempton, a scientist at NASA’s Langley Research Center, told Space.com. “Our team is confident Ice Home is currently the best solution out there for an early Mars outpost.”
Kempton and other NASA scientists think that the Utopia Planitia region on Mars has more water in the form of buried ice than Lake Superior does here on Earth. This ice would also be an excellent source of shielding from radiation, which is potentially hazardous to human health after long-duration Mars surface missions. Astronauts living in an igloo would receive far less radiation than those living in a conventional structure.
Six scientists finished a year-long, NASA-funded stint living on a simulated Red Planet in August, which closely mimicked the conditions on Mars. The dome closely simulated the conditions of Mars, even replicating the 20-minute communications lag that would occur when relaying a message to and from Mars.
NASA spent $1.2 million on the dome study, but it was run through the University of Hawaii. The simulation was the second-longest of its kind next to a mission that lasted 520 days in Russia. NASA plans to conduct three similar experiments in the near future. The space agency estimates that an actual manned Mars mission would take between one and three years to carry out.
NASA currently plans to send real astronauts to Mars in 2030. The total costs of current plans to send Americans to Mars comes out to roughly $35 billion spent by 2025 to arrive in 2030. America is currently better prepared to visit Mars than it was to visit the Moon in the 1960s, according to a study by NASA’s Johnson Space Center. The rocket intended to take American astronauts to Mars in 2030 passed its final full-scale tests in late June.
NASA already has plans to put a large manned space station in orbit above Mars by 2028. The station will remotely operate rovers, analyze samples off dirt and rock and even make short trips to the planet’s two moons.
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