Awards & Nominations
MarsCraft has received the following awards and nominations. Way to go!
Global Nominee
3D Printing Mars Habitat
High-Level Project Summary
Our team worked on designing the essential equipment to live in the Mars's habitats for a year. We designed a brand new rover wheels that's more functional and practical than the ones already used. As well as designing the structure of a Wind Turbine in order to generate energy so we could extract elements from the soil of mars to keep an enough amount of materials for the the 3D Printers.Our designed furniture include sleeping space, a multi-tasking cabinets which can used as a functional table for different purposes, and a multi-tasking tool that can be used for eating and repairing.Our designs uses a reasonable amount of material that solves the issue of the limited material available.
Link to Final Project
Link to Project "Demo"
Detailed Project Description
Our project contains designs of different equipment and furniture that solves many of the problems we face while making the habitats such as the limited access to materials.
The sleeping space: We designed a new tools to help astronauts build themselves a functional and easy sleeping space. our sleeping area contains Beds and a pole
The beds will be made out of plastic sheets ,with a length of 195 cm. They are adjustable easily. The first bed will be 50 cm above ground, the bed above will be 150cm above ground they will have a width of 60cm.
The pole will be made of concrete to be stronger, it will have a width of 15 cm and length of 20-25cm, it will have a ladder built into it to help them to get to their beds
There will be clippers to connect the beds to the wall and the pole.
What's special about this design is that we can do it and undo it very easily just by unplugging the clippers that connect the beds to the pole and walls.
The Wind Turbine: We designed the outside structure wind turbine that could be used on Mars
The Tower of the turbine will be made out of plastic and concrete. There will be 2 layers of plastic from the outside and the inside and a layer of concrete between the plastic layers. The tower will be 4 meters long. the wind turbine contains 3 hubs that will be made out of a thin layer of metal to give our hubs more strength where the length is 1cm and it will be covered by a thicker layer of plastic from the outside to protect it from different conditions. Our Nacelle is also made out of a thick layer of plastic from the outside. We will make a base for the turbine out of concrete for more satiability. Our wind turbines are special than the ones on Earth because the have a giant magnet connected to it so it can Generate electric field and collects metallic dust from the surrounding soil and sandy storms. And because Mars's soil contains 43.48 % silicon dioxide and 16.08% iron oxide, we can extract plastic and metal out of the soil and use it as a source of supplies in our 3D Printers.
The wind turbines will be working on generating energy in order to use that energy while extracting the elements mentioned above by turning the power generated in it into electrical and thermal energy used in the process of making the elements.
Multitasking tools: We came up with the idea while thinking of the possibility of multi-tasking.
The tools will be made of two parts, one is the stick (the handle) that is made out of metal and has an end like a nail, in which it will stick to the tool itself, which is also made out of metal and that will have an end that the stick will get into.
The measure of the stick is to be 10cm. And the tool itself would be 3-10 cm depending on the use of it.
For example we can do a knife, or a driver, or a spoon, with a measurement that would suite them, with an end that would get perfectly with the stick.
The rover wheels: The wheels will be made out of metal. Just like a spherical ball but with less material used from the 3D printer, we will make a small ball connected to the pole leading to the engine. This ball will have spiked poles coming out of it in directions and at the end of these poles, we will connect smaller balls made out of a thick layer of metal but empty from the inside. The balls have a distance of 1.5cm away from each other which will allow them to drive over sand easily and over rocks. This way even if one pole bricks, we can simply reprint only that part and attach it to the main ball. Also the wheel will still function even if we lost some of the poles over a ride. The pole will be connected like a screw to the big ball and will be printed in 2 parts since the metal 3D printer cannot print long poles. The main ball will have places to screw in the poles and the smaller balls will have a place to screw in the other end of the pole. In total, the diameter of the wheel will be 50cm and has less surface area than a full sphere yet a great impulse to keep moving over sand, ice and rocks. The small bolls will have some sort of spiked arrows on them leading to a clear path and direction of where the rover is walking.
The cabinet : it's a multitask usage and made out of various materials. We will have a cabinet connected to a table that’s adjustable that could be used easily and save space and materials. The cabinets will have a length of 160cm, width of 70cm and height of 70cm.
The table will have a length of 150cm , width of 60cm and thickness of 2-5cm.
Space Agency Data
Over all: We used most of the resources provided on the website of the challenge including Deep Space Habitability Design Guidelines Based on the NASA NextSTEP Phase 2 Ground Test Program
These resources gave us a good starting point and gave us the information we needed to know to be able to come up with the most accurate designs of the furniture and the equipment.
For the Rover Wheels:We looked up all the previous designs of the rover wheels used on the surface of Mars before and what difficulties it faced in order to make a new design of the wheels that can solve the problems out there .
We used ARC 3D Models Database including:
- M2020_WHEEL_DESKTOP_MODEL-5inch
- Mars 2020 Sample Tube 3D print files
- Curiosity Rover
- M2020 Model Rover Perseverance
For the Wind Turbine: We looked up different internet websites to understand the structure of the wind turbines used on Earth such as:
- http://gizenergy.org.vn/media/app/media/PDF-Docs/Technical-Documents/The_Structure_of_a_Modern_Wind_Turbine.pdf
- https://www.energy.gov/eere/inside-wind-turbine
- https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/energy-explained/how-does-wind-turbine-work
These resources helped us understand the structure of the wind turbine and how it works on Earth and we developed a new outside structure that fits Mars's different conditions.
We came up with all the other furniture and tools ideas and designs that we designed
Hackathon Journey
This was a lovely experience that helped us to learn to work as a team, to listen to each other's opinion and to choose a leader who would be the judge in our controversial subjects. We gained a lot of experience in how to search for accurate information from trusted resources. We learned to work under pressure for 48 hours and accept criticism from different teams. At the same time we tried to answer as many questions as we could from the ones that came in the description.
References
Deep Space Habitability Design Guidelines Based on the NASA NextSTEP Phase 2 Ground Test Program
M2020_WHEEL_DESKTOP_MODEL-5inch
Mars 2020 Sample Tube 3D print files
Curiosity Rover
M2020 Model Rover Perseverance
http://gizenergy.org.vn/media/app/media/PDF-Docs/Technical-Documents/The_Structure_of_a_Modern_Wind_Turbine.pdf
https://www.energy.gov/eere/inside-wind-turbine
https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/energy-explained/how-does-wind-turbine-work