AROUND THE COLLEGE
Nittany Lion Paw Prints on Martian Soil? Maybe someday… As human exploration of Mars becomes more of a possibility, planning for the basic needs of the explorers begins with conceptualizing a shelter. A team of Penn Staters is making a strong case that they should be the ones to join with NASA in developing the technology to create a habitat on Mars. PennStateDen@Mars is an interdisciplinary team, led by Stuckeman School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture faculty members Shadi Nazarian and José Duarte, competing in NASA’s 3D-Printed Habitat Challenge, a Centennial Challenges competition that asks inventors to design a human shelter that can be 3D-printed on site using indigenous or recycled materials.
Rendering of the Penn State team’s proposed shelters on Mars. Image courtesy José Duarte.
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The goal of the four-phased competition is to create an autonomous machine that will someday be deployed to the moon, Mars, or beyond to construct shelters for human habitation, according to a NASA release. “The ideas and technologies this competition has already produced are encouraging, and we are excited to see what this next phase will bring,” Monsi Roman, program manager of NASA’s Centennial Challenges, said in a statement. “The solutions we seek from our competitions are revolutionary, which by nature makes them extremely difficult. But this only fuels our teams to work harder to innovate and solve.”
