SpaceTrash Hack: Revolutionizing Recycling on Mars


Summary

During a hypothetical three-year mission to Mars and back, an eight-person crew would accumulate 12,600 kg of inorganic waste, or trash, including various packaging materials, textiles, and structural materials. This scenario creates a pressing need to recycle available materials, rather than execute the expensive and inefficient processes of transporting additional resources from Earth and/or sending trash back to Earth. As humans prepare to explore unknown worlds in the future, your challenge is to design sustainable systems that could manage, reuse, or recycle inorganic waste (“trash”) that is brought to and/or accumulated on the surface of Mars.


Extended Summary

On a Martian settlement, millions of miles from Earth, how will we take out the trash? Where does that trash go when it’s taken out? Space explorers will need to implement sanitation facilities or recycling plants to process waste, and keep new worlds as clean as possible. An astronaut’s most common waste items – fabrics, food packaging, structural elements, foam packaging, Ethylene-Vinyl Acetate (EVA) waste, and other packaging materials – cannot easily be recycled or reused in their original forms. And while the International Space Station can return waste to Earth for processing every few months, astronauts heading to Mars will not have the same luxury. Future missions to Mars will need to manage inorganic waste generated from the crew’s daily operations with the goal of reusing and recycling as much as possible, and throwing away as little as possible. Human exploration of Mars is in its infancy, so development of these systems has not been extensively researched. Cutting-edge, innovative solutions are needed to set the standard for space recycling for many missions to come. Such solutions will need to consider the characteristics of a mission’s landing site, and the various waste streams that will need to be recycled when astronauts live there to enable a sustainable, circular economy of commodities while promoting a tidy environment.


Objectives

Your challenge is to design a sustainable system that manages, reuses, and recycles the inorganic waste (“trash”) accumulated or generated on the surface of Mars by a hypothetical human mission landing at Jezero Crater. Can you develop a system that processes waste or items that have served their original purpose to address one or more of the following three scenarios?


  1. 1. Residence Renovations: Your crew has landed on Mars, and you need to inflate your habitat. Crew members need to spread out an inflatable habitat, then hook its corners to a 3-D cube structure that is used as a frame for the habitat when it inflates. Once the habitat is inflated and secured, the cube is no longer necessary and can be reused. Also, the foam packaging that housed the habitat and its frame are now available for reuse or recycling, as well. How can your crew put these materials to good use?


  2. 2. Cosmic Celebrations: A member of your astronaut crew is celebrating a birthday, and you want to commemorate the experience with a party! However, party supplies are not available on Mars and the only option is to recycle and reuse materials from around the habitat. How will you use these materials to celebrate this event?


  3. 3. Daring Discoveries: Your crew has been experimenting with extracting oxygen from the CO2 in the Mars atmosphere. After completing these experiments, many elements from your research are now available for reuse or recycling, including the devices used for extraction, and a surplus of carbon that is left over from the extraction. How can your crew put these elements to good use?