WOULD you volunteer to live on a Martian colony if you had to take all your supplies of air and water with you? It’s unlikely. The only way a colony will survive is by making such life-giving essentials on site. And it looks like it can be done.
Don Sadoway, a natural resources scientist at MIT in Boston, told NASA’s materials science conference in Huntsville, Alabama, how breathable oxygen can be produced from common iron ores in Martian soil. And chemical engineer Ken Debelak at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee revealed how to extract drinking water from Martian clays and minerals.…
