SpaceX CEO Elon Musk recently unveiled how his company plans to help build a Mars colony through an interplanetary transport system that would take humans to the Red Planet.
Getting people to Mars, however, is only half of the challenges involved in making Mars a new home for humans. It is crucial to ensure that people can actually live on the planet for a long time, which would require provisions for food, fuel and other necessities.
SpaceX may soon have the transport system needed to ferry people to extraterrestrial worlds, but it would still require help from NASA to make its proposed goal of building a sustainable colony on the Red Planet possible.
To build a self-sustaining colony on Mars, it is crucial to tap on resources that are already available on the Martian planet.
NASA scientists have fortunately been working on ways to make this possible. Researchers with the U.S space agency have been working on ways to harvest Martian resources. In a paper (PDF) published in April, NASA outlined several ways materials that are already present on Mars such as minerals and atmospheric gases can be harvested to produce plastic, fuels and rocket propellants.
NASA's mining robot Regolith Advanced Surface Systems Operations Robot, or RASSOR, would likely play a role in mining these resources. The machine is designed to collect soil or regolith on the moon or Mars, which can then be processed to commodities and even breathable air.
With the ability to make use of materials that are already available in other worlds in the solar system, astronauts and possibly human colonists no longer have to carry necessities from Earth.
The robot, which could be attached to a rover or could be made into a rover, uses a rotating device for scooping up soils that could be used to extract resources. It is also equipped with capabilities designed to meet the hurdles of low gravity as well as steep and rough terrains.
"[E]xcavation is not reliant on the traction or weight of the mobility system to provide a reaction force to counteract the excavation force in low-gravity environments," NASA reported. "The excavator can traverse steep slopes and rough terrain, and its symmetrical design enables it to operate in reverse so that it can recover from overturning by continuing to dig in the new orientation."
On Sept. 29, NASA released a video that introduced a scaled-up version of the 2013 design of RASSOR.
