The Sun: A Helping Hand in Construction

The Sun is an indispensable star in our solar system. Every day, it brings light, warmth, and an enormous amount of energy to our planet. Ever since our school days, we have known that plants are the only life forms on Earth capable of absorbing this energy, “digesting” it through photosynthesis, and passing it on to all the other creatures in our world. This is how life is sustained.

But over time, the Sun became more than a source of life-giving energy for us: it became a source of energy for industry and other human activities (for example, solar panels). Since this energy can be considered “clean” (it does not pollute the environment), harnessing it has enormous potential.

And one such possibility is using the Sun for construction. Not just any construction, either. For a long time, humanity has been talking about the possibility of flying to Mars and eventually colonizing it. But given Mars’s unusual atmosphere and climate, normal, familiar human life there is out of the question. That is why methods and techniques are now being developed to carry out all the necessary work in those conditions.



One of the major challenges of exploring Mars is construction (of shelters, laboratories, and so on). The cargo capacity of spacecraft is extremely limited, making it difficult to transport building materials and equipment (such as brick kilns).
But scientists from the European Space Agency have already taken the first steps toward solving this problem. They developed a way to make bricks using only lunar dust (the original challenge was construction on the Moon) and concentrated sunlight.
In a successful experiment, they baked a lunar-dust analogue (various volcanic rocks) using a solar furnace—specially arranged mirrors that focus the Sun’s energy on a small area.

The resulting material was quite lightweight but probably not very strong, and making it took about five hours. Even so, this is a significant step toward building structures on a planet as inhospitable as Mars.