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It had not. Mars doesn\u2019t appear to have had the geology that concentrated metals into dense, minable deposits. <\/p>\n
A city there would need to import its structural materials from elsewhere in the solar system, and a new study ran the numbers to show how.<\/p>\n
Researcher Serena Suriano of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL<\/a>) conducted a feasibility study. <\/p>\n The team asked what a self-supporting Mars colony would consume in metals and where those metals could realistically come from.<\/p>\n The Red Planet\u2019s surface is genuinely iron-rich. But scattered iron oxide dust is not a minable ore body, and local extraction would demand enormous energy for meager returns.<\/p>\n Some industrial elements are scarce. Boron and molybdenum, used in high-performance alloys, are either trace-level on the surface or have not been pinned down at all in the data.<\/p>\n Earth shipping falls short<\/p>\n The obvious workaround is to fly metals in from Earth. However, a single cargo run takes six to nine months depending on planetary alignment.<\/p>\n Each ton of payload still costs tens of millions of dollars to launch. That bill might cover a few resupply missions, but it cannot sustain a city.<\/p>\n Their answer points outward. Millions of asteroids orbit through the inner solar system. <\/p>\n A subset, M-type asteroids, are essentially mountains of iron and nickel, with trace amounts of precious metals mixed in.<\/p>\n Some of these objects are thought to be the exposed cores of small planets that broke apart in the early solar system. <\/p>\n This is why NASA\u2019s Psyche probe<\/a> is currently flying out to one for a closer look.<\/p>\n Traveling from the asteroid belt to Mars demands far less fuel than launching off Earth. That makes asteroids a plausible source in a way Earth itself is not.<\/p>\n The barrier of fuel<\/p>\n Getting there is the hard part. The team modeled a mining<\/a> ship based on Starship specs, requiring 120 tons of dry mass, 115 tons of payload, and 1,100 tons of propellant.<\/p>\n A full tank gives the ship a fixed energy budget for the whole trip. <\/p>\n That might sound generous, but when compared with asteroid routes, the number shrinks fast.<\/p>\n Every metallic asteroid the team examined requires roughly twice that fuel budget for a complete round trip from Mars<\/a>. There are no exceptions.<\/p>\n Turning asteroids into refueling stations<\/p>\n The proposed fix is a multi-stop run. <\/p>\n A mining ship would haul to a metallic asteroid, load up on iron and nickel, then divert to a different kind of rock to brew fresh propellant on site.<\/p>\n The second stop would be at carbonaceous asteroids, ancient rocks rich in hydrocarbons. <\/p>\n When the right minerals are processed correctly, the propellant chemistry takes care of itself.<\/p>\n The trick is producing the rocket fuel locally on the asteroid itself. NASA has spent years developing versions of this technology through Mars-focused research<\/a> and testing.<\/p>\n No full return tank is required. The propellant would be manufactured then carried on to Mars.<\/p>\n A decade per delivery<\/p>\n The catch here is time. A two-stop journey \u2013 to a metallic asteroid, then a carbonaceous one, and finally back to Mars \u2013 could take a decade.<\/p>\n Orbital alignments determine that schedule. Asteroids and Mars have to be in the right positions before a transfer window opens up.<\/p>\n Slow propellant<\/a> production extends it even further. Current estimates run around four pounds per day. <\/p>\n This is fine for keeping a small base supplied, but not for filling a 1,100-ton tank.<\/p>\n Resupply would need to happen roughly every two years, syncing with Earth-Mars launch windows. <\/p>\n This would be cheaper than constant shipments from Earth. The cadence would slowly cut the colony\u2019s dependence on home-planet logistics.<\/p>\n Future endeavors on Mars<\/p>\n The main finding is not that asteroid<\/a> mining solves the Mars problem tomorrow. Engineers are still decades away from a working asteroid mining operation.<\/p>\n What the paper does, for the first time, is map a full supply chain<\/a> end to end and show how the numbers work in practice.<\/p>\n Scaling up propellant production means asteroid metal becomes the cheaper option for a growing colony. <\/p>\n Mining the belt stops being a science-fiction premise and becomes a logistics problem with solvable equations.<\/p>\n That changes what a future settlement on Mars could be. It would no longer be a fragile outpost tethered to Earth, but the anchor of its own industrial backyard.<\/p>\n The study is published in arXiv<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u2014\u2013<\/p>\n Like what you read? Subscribe to our newsletter<\/a> for engaging articles, exclusive content, and the latest updates.<\/p>\n Check us out on EarthSnap<\/a>, a free app brought to you by Eric Ralls<\/a> and Earth.com.<\/p>\n \u2014\u2013<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"From space, Mars resembles a construction site. Iron oxide, the same basic chemistry as rust, blankets the surface…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":443182,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[111,139,69,147,392],"class_list":["post-443181","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/443181","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=443181"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/443181\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/443182"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=443181"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=443181"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=443181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}