Every school child can tell you these days that Mars is red because it’s rusty. The silicate rock of the martian crust and regolith is very rich in iron oxide. Now Australian researchers at CSIRO and Swinburn University claim they know how to break that iron loose.
In-situ Resource Utilization (IRSU) is a big deal in space exploration, with good reason. Every kilogram of resources you get on site is one you don’t have to fight the tyranny of the rocket equation for. Iron might not be something you’d ever be able to haul from Earth to the next planet over, but when you can make it on site? You can build like a Victoria is still queen and it’s time to flex on the French.
The key to the process seems to be simple pyrolysis: they describe putting dirt that is geochemically analogous to martian regolith into a furnace, and heating to 1000 °C under Martian atmospheric conditions to get iron metal. At 1400 °C, they were getting iron-silicon alloys– likely the stuff steelmakers call ferrosilicon, which isn’t something you’d build a crystal palace with.
It’s not clear how economical piling red dust into a thousand-degree furnace would be on Mars– that’s certainly not going to cut it on Earth– but compared to launch costs from Earth, it’s not unimaginable that martian dirt could be considered ore.
“It’s not clear how economical piling red dust into a thousand-degree furnace would be on Mars”
We are far from there yet, but in the end, unless you are doing asteroid mining in say the Xinglong (The Expanse), it’s likely more economical than launching Terran iron for those starter habitats.
Some sort of thermonuclear power source and a lightweight titanium furnace maybe? Oh, Canada (ISS) style extensible arms under machine learning control would be good there!
Launch that robot at Mars then come in later to (hopefully) a pile of pre-made ingots could be quite a “Satisfactory (game)” type starter habitat solution to get your crew out of the sun’s radiation.
(it’s fun to think of, anyway, even if very silly)
Very funny guys, who swapped out the regolith simulant for Milo?
So, if we could forge lengths of circular section iron up there would they be Mars bars?
I’ll see myself out.