In what’s likely to become India’s biggest science programme in the next few years, Isro has started work on building igloos on the Moon. These ‘lunar habitats’, as scientists call them, will be built by sending robots and 3D printers to the Moon, and by using lunar soil and other materials.
The project has seen progress with a working model – created using a 3D printer – sitting in the space agency’s lunar terrain test facility. Scientists have drawn up five designs of the lunar habitats, and hope their work could contribute to scientists’ plans of creating outposts on the Moon.
Isro Satellite Centre (Isac) director M Annadurai told TOI: “We are seriously planning to use the Moon as an outpost – like missions in Antarctica. In the long run, the space station is likely to be scrapped. Many countries, including the US, are considering building more permanent structures on the Moon and working out of there. When it happens, we want India to have contributed.”
According to him, astronauts going to the Earth’s satellite in the future will spend more than just a few hours there.
‘Interplanetary satellites from Moon is the goal’
To keep them safe and help them work from there, we need smart materials, which is what we are focusing on building,” he said.
Annadurai said the space agency has mastered the process of creating lunar stimulant (soil), and it has about 60 tonnes of it. Its properties match 99.6% with the samples brought from Moon by Apollo missions.
TOI visited the lunar terrain test facility at the Isro Spacecraft Integration Test Establishment. Senior scientist and project lead I Venugopal has applied for a global patent for the process of manufacturing the lunar simulant.
Thanks to this technology, Isro has been able to manufacture 60 tonnes of the simulant at Rs 10 lakh, a fraction of the Rs 50 crore it would have cost if it had purchased from the US. Prof Muthukumaran from NIT-Trichy and Prof Anbalagan from Periyar University, Salem, helped Venugopal’s team in finding the right process of making the soil, which is being used to test the Lander for the Chandrayaan-2 mission, scheduled for an April launch.
“It may sound crazy today. But you’ll see that one day men will be working out of there, and the goal is to launch interplanetary satellites from the Moon,” Venugopal said, adding the project work began in 2011.
