Scientists exploring the universe often encounter difficult headaches, and how to bring the bulky meteorites back to Earth for research is one of them. If the luxury aircraft brought back those cumbersome "big guys", I am afraid that the aircraft has not been exhausted until half of the fuel has been exhausted. In order to solve this problem, scientists began to try to use 3D printing to copy the original appearance of the meteorite. This is indeed A good idea!
Meteorite seen by the Mars rover
Back in 2009, the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory team discovered a strange rock on Mars through a panoramic camera of the Mars Rover, named Block Island. As can be seen from the figure, the rock is about 2 feet long and about half a foot high. The blue tone of the metal texture is quite different from the rock in the surrounding area. Because the probe car is also relatively large, it has encountered a lot of trouble during the detection process. When the Mars rover took the picture to Earth, it drove through Block Island. In order to study the Martian meteorite carefully, the probe retreated a few hundred feet back until the rock edge, and the robot finally hit the block again. Island.
Mars meteorite detected on site
So the research team decided to use their Dimension 3D printer to print the meteorite that had fallen on Mars, and they finally printed a very realistic replica that was almost exactly the same as the real meteorite. After further analysis, the scientists found that Block Island is a special type of meteorite, mainly composed of two elements, iron and nickel. From the outside, this meteorite has been subjected to friction, sanding and sand erosion. This is the first time NASA has used 3D printing technology to print alien objects shot by Mars Rover, which is groundbreaking.
1/25 scale Mars meteorite Block Island 3D print model
To print this Martian meteorite, the researchers used a software commonly used for navigator navigation to create depth mesh images of meteorite surfaces from six locations and combine them into a 3D digital model, due to the volume of Block Island The largest size that a 3D printer can print, the researchers had to split the 3D model of the meteorite into 11 parts.
Segmented printed Mars meteorite
In the end, the Dimension 3D printer took a total of 305 hours to print the vermiculite, using more than 280 cubic inches of acrylic thermoplastic material and approximately 37 cubic inches of plastic support material to form the support structure within the rock model. The researchers then assembled the printed parts and colored them according to the images returned by the lunar rover to make them consistent in color. For the exploration team, using 3D printing technology is also a good solution if it is not possible to bring real Martian rock samples back to Earth.
(Editor)
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