Spacex show the plane of the martian city

A Martian colony can perform various functions. It can serve as a research outpost, a mining colony, or even a second home for earthlings if something goes wrong on our own planet. But beyond that, Mars could be a source of one of the most potentially valuable elements in the space economy, hydrogen.

A new paper published by a group led by Dr. Mikhail Shubov from the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, USA, discusses just such a possibility. Hydrogen has many different uses, from forming water molecules to being used as a component in rocket fuel. The problem is that in the inner part of the solar system, access to hydrogen is very limited.

Huge reserves of hydrogen are contained in the matter of Jupiter and the Sun, but extracting it from these giant "gravity wells" is technologically impractical. Smaller celestial bodies, such as asteroids, have some water that can be used as a source of hydrogen, but these reserves are not enough to meet the needs of this element throughout the solar system.

In this light, the extraction of hydrogen on Mars seems promising, says Dr. Shubov and his colleagues. Mars is not as deep a gravity well as the gas giants of the solar system, and at the same time it has quite large reserves of hydrogen. Hydrogen on Mars is in the form of an oxygen compound, water, but water is easily split under the action of electrical energy into its original components - hydrogen and oxygen. Oxygen is also a valuable element and can be used for breathing by the inhabitants of the Martian colony, Shubov notes.

Mars has a fairly rich supply of water, with satellite data showing over five million cubic meters of water in the form of ice on the surface and shallow below the surface of the planet. Shubov proposes to start “exporting” hydrogen from the Red Planet not immediately, but only when the colony develops basic infrastructures, including orbital infrastructure, and its population exceeds 10,000 people. At this stage, it will be possible to build, for example, a hydrogen transporter, which is a very long railgun that can send portions of hydrogen from the surface of Mars into orbit. Alternative solutions for "export logistics" will also be possible, the paper notes. From orbit, hydrogen will be distributed throughout the inner solar system, including the Earth, the authors say.

The study appeared on the server of preliminary scientific publications arxiv.org.