Three Little Pigs on Mars

Mars & Earth are cousins, yet very different. Billions of years ago Mars had oceans, seas and air. Conditions like these would have supported life. There is an international race for Mars exploration. Exciting discoveries and missions are happening in our lifetimes such as Mars Rovers to Artemis missions. Humans want to explore staying on Mars for three main reasons:

a) Economic interest in its resources

b) Reduce possibility of human extinction by occupying other planets

c) Improve quality of life on Earth.

The challenges are many, but the scientists are working day and night to put humans on Mars in the next 10 years. There are a lot of problems such as how to get there, where to live, how to get oxygen and water and finally how to move around on Mars. Basically, to survive on Mars, shelter, oxygen, water, and food is needed.

I want to focus on research on shelters on Mars.

To protect from the extreme conditions on Mars, one option would be to build houses in underground caves, which would be a good way to keep warm as well as keep away from radiation. Building houses would require materials in bulk and transporting those materials to Mars is another challenge.

The expected outcome and solution to the shelter problem is to prove that existing material from Mars such as Martian regolith with minimal additional materials from Earth would be able to shield the radiation most effectively and would prevent the need to transport heavy material from Earth to Mars for achieving the same objective of building houses.

In this research, I wanted to find out what would be the best material for building houses if I decided to start living on Mars where a high amount of ionizing radiation is present. To find out the best material that can block ionizing radiation, I decided to measure initial radiation using a Geiger test card and an ionizing smoke detector as sources. I measured the radiation with a Geiger Counter. After the initial radiation was measured, I introduced different materials between the radiation source and the Geiger Counter such as paper, aluminum, wood, silver, plastic, and simulated Mars regolith covered with different materials such as plastic and banana peel. I discovered that Martian regolith combined with plastic and banana peel blocked the most radiation, while paper and aluminum did not block the radiation as effectively. The reason for this is that the combination of Martian regolith padded with banana peels and plastic contained more hydrogen content than other materials. Hydrogen has the highest density of electrons per nucleon and no neutrons, making it the best material for shielding against ionizing space radiation. Additionally, Martian regolith is mainly made up of iron and aluminum, which block gamma and beta rays