We’re already dumping a ton of trash on Mars—and we haven’t even set foot on it yet.
The next time you see a shooting star, there’s a small chance it’s complete garbage. That’s not a knock on any meteors or comets out there. It’s the truth. To deal with trash that piles up on the International Space Station, astronauts put them into big cargo bins and jettison them back into Earth’s atmosphere where it all burns up in a blaze of glory.
One project NASA is working on right now is a compaction system that could turn astronaut garbage into tiles that can then be used for practical applications like radiation shielding. Such an approach hits home at an ethos that’s relevant here on Earth but especially important if you’re an astronaut who is weeks or even months away from a crucial resupply mission: reduce, reuse, recycle., held this past spring.
The challenge marked the beginning of answering a question that’s becoming more and more relevant as NASA embarks on its bold goal of going back to the moon and, eventually, Mars and beyond: What the hell are we going to do with all our extraterrestrial garbage? After all, astronauts won’t be able to just yeet it back to Earth like those on the ISS.
Undoubtedly, the grossest category of the challenge involved what to do with fecal waste. One example involves fermenting fecal matter in order to break it down. The idea is to “get anaerobic decomposition very similar to what goes on with composting,” Sepka said. “We’re getting microbes to do it and what to do with leftover materials. It’s very similar to what we do on Earth.”As with so much science fiction before, it could have real world use cases once researchers and engineers get behind it.
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