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Is Marscrete the answer to building life on Mars?

How can we build on Mars? A casual chat with a geologist led a University of Canterbury (UC) engineering academic and his team to spend years researching how to build on Mars. It all started with Associate Professor Allan Scott and Geology Professor Chris Oze (Occidental College) pondering what materials were available on Mars to make concrete or ‘Marscrete’.

Associate Professor Allan Scott is researching basaltic rock and silica to make Marscrete for constructing habitats on Mars

But the pressing question is: What is available on Mars to bind the materials of Marscrete together?

“Unfortunately, on Mars there is not a lot of limestone so we are looking at alternative ways to find some sort of binder system,” says Associate Professor Allan Scott. “Marscrete can be referred to as a whole range of different materials that could be used on Mars essentially from local ingredients.”

The team has been researching the use of basaltic rock which can be found on Earth and on Mars. According to Associate Professor Scott, magnesium oxide and silica can be extracted from the basaltic rock, before recombining the magnesium oxide and silica to make a binder with similar properties to cement.

“We try to use materials, rocks and things, that we know are available on Mars so we can perfect that extraction process here and make concrete which has similar properties as Portland cement.”

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