Plants will be able to build infrastructure for humans on Mars: the first successes are already in place

Plant workers in the future may build the infrastructure for Earth settlers on other planets. And they will do so from what they themselves will find in the soil.

The first such "helpers" are being developed by Italian biologist and engineer Barbara Mazzolai, reports MIT Press. Although it's not easy enough to imagine a combination of robots and plants that would be effective helpers for humans, Mazzolai is convinced that it makes common sense.

The least visible part of a plant - its roots - may not be as interesting and colorful as flowers or leaves, but they are the ones that anchor the plant and constantly gather information from the soil to decide which direction to grow, to find nutrients, to avoid salty soil. and not to interfere with the roots of other plants. In other words, as the scientist explained, plant roots are a fantastic system for underground exploration.

"It has forced us to rethink everything from materials to sensing and managing the work," she said.

The idea of using roborastenium in space came to Mazzollai during a meeting with representatives from the European Space Agency (ESA). During the meeting, she realized that space engineers were struggling with a problem that plants brilliantly solved several hundred million years ago.

"In real plants, roots have two functions. They explore the soil in search of water and nutrients, but more importantly, they anchor a plant that would otherwise collapse and die," the scientist explained.

Attachment, as it turns out, is a problem not only for plants, but also for spacecraft, whose weight is sometimes insufficient to hold on to space objects, such as Mars, the Moon or an asteroid, that do not have the same gravitational force as Earth.

To do this, spacecraft are equipped with harpoons, compression nails, and drills. But these systems become unreliable over time if the ground subsides or doesn't work at all.

Mazzolai and her team came up with a system back in 2008 that would solve this problem and proposed testing it on Mars, but ESA rejected it at the time.

"It was too futuristic and required technology that didn't exist yet," Biology explained.

The idea was that the spacecraft would make a depression in the soil during a hard landing, into which a "seed" would be planted, from which a robotic root would quickly sprout, creating pressure on the soil and providing a foothold. Such a root would also be able to analyze the soil to establish itself as effectively as possible.

Mazzolai subsequently convinced the European Commission to fund a three-year study that resulted in a plant-inspired robot, codenamed Plantoid.

"This was uncharted territory ... creating a robot without a predetermined shape that could grow and move around in the soil - a robot composed of independent units that would self-organize and make decisions collectively," the scientist said.

Mazzolai and her team designed the robot's roots as flexible, articulated, cylindrical structures with a mechanism that could move their tips in different directions. Instead of the elongation mechanism developed for ESA's initial study, Mazzolai designed a real growth mechanism, essentially a miniature 3D printer that can continuously add material behind the root tip, thereby pushing it into the ground.

The robot releases heated plastic roots that quickly cool and become hard, locking into the soil.

"The fact that the root presses into the soil with only its tip makes it fundamentally different from traditional drills, which are very destructive. The root, on the contrary, looks for existing breaks in the soil into which it can sprout, and only if it doesn't find them does it apply enough pressure to create the break itself," Mazzolai explains.

It is also equipped with soft, folded leaves that move gently toward light and moisture. So far, these leaves cannot turn light into energy, but Michael Gratzel, a chemistry professor at EPFL in Lausanne, has already developed transparent, complex films filled with synthetic chlorophyll, capable of turning and storing electricity from light, which could one day become artificial leaves that power the work of planktoids.

Meanwhile, Mazzolai and his team are already working on a new robot, called Growbot, inspired by climbing trees on the ground. They are able to use cues from the environment very effectively to find the best place to anchor themselves.

This new project could one day lead to robotic explorers that can work in dark environments with lots of empty space, such as caves or wells.

But Mazzolai is not oblivious to the idea that started it all: planting robotic plants and allowing them to grow on other planets.

Robots inspired by the plants, she says, could not only take soil samples, but also release chemicals to make it more fertile - on Earth or on a theraformed Mars.

Robotic plants could also be used to grow an entire infrastructure from scratch.

"As the planetoids' roots and branches grow, the growbots will create a hollow structure that can be filled with cables or fluids," she explained.

This ability to autonomously grow the infrastructure for a functioning facility would be important when colonizing hostile environments such as Mars, where a forest of plant robots could analyze the soil and search for water and other chemicals, creating a stable structure with plumbing, electrical wiring and communication cables.

Earlier OBOZREVATEL also told about the idea of scientists who want to build homes for astronauts on Mars from potatoes and salt.

They have developed a new type of material that is dubbed "space concrete". Its feature is that, together with Martian dust, it contains such unusual for the construction of components such as potato starch and salt.

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