What could you make with a 3D printer on the Moon?
November 29, 2012
Neanderthal tools? No, test objects printed from simulated Moon dust. (Credit: Amit Bandyopadhyay/Washington State University)
Not for Amit Bandyopadhyay, professor in the School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering at Washington State University, and colleagues, who recently published a paper in Rapid Prototyping Journal demonstrating how to do just that.
Bandyopadhyay and Susmita Bose, professor in the School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering, are well known researchers in the area of three-dimensional printing, creating bone-like materials for orthopedic implants.
The high expense of space travel limits what space ships have to carry. So a lunar or Martian outpost would have to use materials that are on hand for construction or repairs.
LENS-750 3D printer (credit: Optomec)
That’s where the 3-D fabrication technology might come in. Three-dimensional fabrication technology, also known as additive manufacturing, allows researchers to produce complex three dimensional objects directly from computer-aided design (CAD) models, printing the material layer by layer. The material is heated using a laser to high temperatures and prints out like melting candle wax to a desired shape.
To test the wild idea, NASA researchers provided Bandyopadhyay and Bose with 10 pounds of raw lunar regolith simulant, an imitation moon rock that is used for research purposes.
The WSU researchers were concerned about how the moon rock material, which is made of silicon, aluminum, calcium, iron and magnesium oxides, would melt, but they found it behaved similarly to silica. And they built a few simple shapes.
The researchers are the first to demonstrate the ability to fabricate parts using the moon-like material. They sent their pieces to NASA.
Using additive manufacturing, the material could also be tailored, the researchers say. If you want a stronger building material, for instance, you could perhaps use some moon rock with earth-based additives. The advantage of additive manufacturing is that you can control the composition as well as the geometry,” says Bose.
In the future, the researchers hope to show that the lunar material could be used to do remote repairs — and presumably find a miniaturized version of the industrial-strength LENS-750 3D printer they used.
The research was supported by a $750,000 W.M. Keck Foundation grant.
Comments (8)
by Mostly Foobar
Regolith? Everyone is always talking about regolith as if all moon dust is the same. Strange.
Isn’t this like saying ,”Oh, I’ve got some earth-dirt here. Lets see what can be made from earth-dirt.” ?
Where is the dirt from? what’s in it? Do people just assume that regolith is regolith, here’s its composition, it’s all the same? that’s crazy. The only homogenizing process for moon dust is upheaval by impact. So people are saying there has been so much impact on the surface of the moon that all the regolith is homogenous…? despite the fact that some of it is from half a kilometer deep, and some of it is ejecta from craters that are completely within lava flows?
Quit talking about regolith like it’s all the same. it cannot possibly be all the same.
I’d be more interested in a 3d printer that could print up the parts for an autonomous assayer and separator that could turn regolith (which is variable in composition no matter what anyone tells you) into little piles or ingots of known materials.
That would be truly useful.
by Dan Aminoff
Any idea how 3D printers work in low gravity environments? Do they rely on gravity alone for deposition? I suppose they could use forced spray if gravity is too low. Not a big problem on the moon but may be an issue on asteroids.
by Marcos Marin
“What could you make with a 3D printer on the Moon?”
A Papier-mâché moon?
Are you pondering what I’m pondering?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmLlnhZGKlQ
by Gorden Russell
By the way, do you all remember yesterday’s articles, “A solar energy funnel to harness a broader spectrum of light,” and “Flexible, low-voltage circuits using nanocrystals?”
The solar energy funnel need molybdenum disulphide, and there is sulfur on the moon and molybdenum should be in all those nickel-iron asteroids that hit the moon during the late bombardment. The flexible circuits are printed with cadmium selenide. I had to go through eleven pages of search hits before finding a paper from NASA that said there was selenium on the moon. The first 30 pages all wanted to tell about dietary supplements of selenium, or warn about the toxicity of selenium, or tell you that selenium was discovered in 1817 and named after the Greek goddess of the moon, Selene.
Once you use up all the feedstock that will come along with the printer and the robot to operate it and the solar array to power both, you will have enough robots to go prospecting. The regolith will be just fine to print out picks and shovels.
Once these elements are located, you will have robots enough to excavate a turn-key moon base. They will even be able to build rockets up there to rendezvous with people in near Earth orbit.
Maybe Richard Branson will get together with Elon Musk or Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen to do this.
by Gorden Russell
Heyyyyy! Who thought of this?
by Gorden Russell
Did you notice in the video that Amit Bandyopadhyay said it would be done sometime in the next 50 to 100 years? I don’t think so. Now that they know that it is possible, NASA is bound to do it by 2020 to 2025.
It all depends on the economy and on who is in Congress.
by Bri
NASA? I’d go with private industry. Way to go Gorden! This articles is just what you want! This Bud’s for you!
by GAUSS
SpaceX, baby. All the way.