First Mars Explorers Could Live Inside Lava Tubes Of Dormant Volcanos

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Astronauts train to scale a Mars volcano at an analogue site in France. Lava tubes that crisscross the Martian surface might provide sanctuaries for the first human explorers on the Red Planet. (Photo by Francis DEMANGE/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)

Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images

As SpaceX races to test and perfect the Starship super-capsules slated to speed the first astronauts to Mars, scientists are floating a sensational venue for the Martian base camp: inside an inactive volcano transformed into a sanctuary for explorers.

Unlike the Earth, whose massive magnetic field protects life and DNA against high-energy cosmic particles shot off by exploding stars, or protons blasted out by the Sun, Mars is sporadically pelted by these celestial bullets, which could threaten any life forms transplanted onto its orange-red dunes.

But now European and American scientists are exploring whether the first human Martians could find refuge via dormant volcanos scattered across the Red Planet, inside lava tubes that criss-cross the Mars underground.

As lava tubes are sighted by European Space Agency and NASA orbiters circling the planet, leading-edge experts in space robotics have created an interlinked team of robots that can be lofted to Mars to reconnoiter and map the most promising basaltic caverns before the first astronauts ever touch down.

Parallel volcanic eruptions across the once-twin planets likely created comparable lava tunnels on Earth and on Mars, otherworldly grottoes that can be surveyed by highly autonomous robots, says Carlos Jesus Pérez-del-Pulgar, a vanguard space robotics researcher at the University of Malaga, on the southern Spanish seacoast.

Due to the risks of exploring volcanic underworlds, especially on another planet, he says, robotic advance scouts can spearhead these expeditions before their human allies arrive.

Pérez-del-Pulgar’s contingent of space roboticists, he tells me in an interview, recently tested a mission concept that could pave the way for ESA, NASA, or SpaceX to fly a squad of AI-enhanced collaborating robots to independently explore and image lava tubes on Mars, and send back intricate 3D models of each site.

In this demo expedition, his group deployed hyper-tech robotic explorers to map a lava tube on a Mars analog site, in the Spanish Canary Islands, which, like the Hawaiian archipelago, were produced via a series of volcanic eruptions.

Their three robotic rovers, outfitted with an array of cutting-edge imagery gear including time-of-flight cameras, helped the team generate an atlas of 3D maps of the site – from its skylight to its inner passageways.

Pérez-del-Pulgar, a renowned scholar at the university’s Space Robotics Laboratory, recounts that one bot, called Coyote III, rappelled from a skylight into the lava tube’s interior as its partner, SherpaTT, acted as an anchor and sentinel from above.

Similar detachments of autonomous robots could be dispatched to chart volcanic chambers near candidate landing sites on Mars to find potential havens for early human explorers, he says.

These subterranean sanctums could protect against not only hazardous radiation, but also micrometeorites and global dust storms that might threaten spacefarers living on the surface of Mars, says Pérez-del-Pulgar, who has also conducted research for the European Space Agency on developing a highly intelligent robot for its 2028 ExoMars mission.

He says the field test in the volcanic grottoes on the Spanish island of Lanzarote was funded by the European Commission, as part of a series of studies on “Cooperative Robots for Extreme Environments.”

His team’s breakthroughs in collaborative robotic exploration of a remote volcanic tunnel, in an operation that was largely autonomous and could be replicated in a future interplanetary mission, were recently featured in the prestigious journal Science Robotics, published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Some lava tubes that wrap across the surface of the Red Planet could make perfect protective shells to position prefabricated human habitats transported aboard the massive Starship capsules that are now counting down to descending on Mars.

Yet each individual lava structure needs to be surveyed and imaged—in three dimensions—to determine its suitability for a human outpost, Pérez-del-Pulgar says.

He says his team of robotic photographers and 3D mapmakers could move from site to site, sending back a sequence of high-resolution models of Martian caverns to be explored by space mission planners, and by Mars-bound astronauts, back on Earth.

Sketching out the potential for droid cartographers to transmit their renderings of volcanic structures from another planetary body was the primary objective of his team’s path-breaking mission on Lanzarote, he says.

Ironically, he adds, the experimental technologies deployed on these futuristic treks are all aimed at helping humans leap ahead into the remote past, when they lived in caves and fire was the technology of the times.

“It is said we will go back to caves as it was in the past if we want to survive on remote planets,” he muses.

Back on Earth, ancient Hawaiians discovered that tubes sculpted by lava flows “could be used as shelter from both the elements and human enemies,” say scientists at the American National Park Service.

“These caves have also had great cultural importance,” they add, and “lava tubes were also central in some ceremonies.”

With their robot-led discoveries inside a Canary volcano, Pérez-del-Pulgar says, “We did the first step to demonstrate enabling technologies that could support future lava cave exploration missions on remote planets.”

Yet he adds his robotic scouts, and their ability to closely cooperate, will have to be perfected before they descend on Mars, whose distance from the Earth, at up to 20-plus light-minutes, will rule out tele-operating the bots from planet to planet.

Raúl Domínguez, co-leader of the robotic demo excursion, tells me in an interview that the future 3D imagery gathered by Martian squads of surveyors, along with their maps, could be transformed into virtual reality simulations of each lava tube site that aeronauts back on Earth could use to train for their Mars landings.

Architects could study these simulations to design specially tailored habitats for each chamber, while NASA and ESA planners select the most outstanding sites to land near.

After following the astonishing flights pioneered by NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter across Mars, his team is sure to add leading-edge drones to its robotic Mars-bound ensembles, adds Domínguez, who is based at the Robotics Innovation Center, part of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, which also designed the SherpaTT and Coyote III rovers.

Flying cameramen soaring above volcanic tunnels on Mars, he adds, could map the surroundings and skylight of each outcropping, or even enter the submerged channel to image its interior.

Leon Danter, a software engineer specializing in the simulation of space robots and missions at the Robotics Innovation Center, based in the German city of Bremen, says while lava tubes hold great promise to shield human quarters on Mars, each one needs to be carefully inspected for safety and stability—by robotic surveyors—before any astronaut dares enter.

Yet he’s confident, Danter tells me in an interview, that these robotic forerunners will pave the way for human explorers to shelter inside underground oases while launching the first phase of their treks across Mars.

When squadrons of intelligent, interconnected robots begin transmitting their high-resolution atlases of volcanic Martian havens—to mission controllers a planet away—he predicts, they will mark a new era of Mars discoveries.

Meanwhile, even before SpaceX’s next-generation Super Heavy rocket and Starship upper stage both made picture-perfect splashdowns during the ship’s latest demo flight in August, founder Elon Musk predicted the globe’s fastest-expanding spacecraft outfit could launch Mars-bound spacefarers five years from now.

During a fantastical overview on his crusade to colonize Mars earlier this year, Musk signaled he hoped to launch the first flotilla of Starships—with robotic shipmates—by the close of 2026.

Robots leading the next flights, two years later, would “prep landing areas” for the first touchdown of humans.

By 2031, they would begin “resource mining and propellant generation, build roads and pads, habitat construction, [and] increase power generation and storage,” according to graphics projected onto a super-screen that backdropped Musk as he laid out his Mars masterplan.

“SpaceX reached a very important milestone with the latest successful 10^th flight test of the Starship, which is the largest spacecraft ever built,” says Carlos Pérez-del-Pulgar.

The Starship, the most technologically advanced space capsule ever designed on Earth, “will allow SpaceX to carry super heavy payloads with the objective of reaching Mars.”

That means if ESA, NASA or SpaceX commissions a precursor mission to chart the great volcanos of Mars, via the 2028 Starship launches, he says, his constellation of space roboticists could join forces with a wider coalition of inventors and mission planners to craft a brigade of robotic scouts and mapmakers.

“We will continue,” he says, “advancing the already developed and tested technologies to be used in the next planetary exploration mission that, for sure, will be focused on the exploration of lava caves.”

Pete Worden, a leading American astrophysicist and onetime director of the NASA Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, says charting these volcano-shaped sanctuaries will be just the first step in the human invasion of Mars.

Worden tells me in an interview that Harvard scholar Robin Wordsworth, his co-author on a recent Red Planet study and one of the top American experts on terraforming Mars, is now designing compact astronaut outposts that can be positioned inside lava tubes and speedily inhabited.

Yet the next phase of colonizing Mars, he predicts, will see the construction of colossal crystalline geodesic domes to host hyper-tech cities and Eden-like gardens, all part of a new branch of civilization.

Both Worden and Wordsworth say they envision remaking Mars as a bioengineered twin of Earth, launching rings of 100-kilometer solar mirrors into orbit to heat the entire planet, melt its poles, and restore its ocean and atmosphere.

Genetically edited photosynthetic microbes and flora, they add, will gradually release oxygen into the air, with humans ultimately able to breathe, without masks, on the surface.

Yet escaping life underground will depend on another technological leap: generating powerful magnetic fields, first around the domed cities, and later surrounding all of Mars, to shield against the cosmic micro-missiles that whiz through space.