Before humans can land on Mars, NASA needs much more information. It wants to put humans back on Earth’s moon by 2024 and establish a sustainable human outpost there by 2028, using that as a testing ground for future missions to Mars.

These missions present extraordinary engineering challenges as well as many opportunities to expand our understanding of these environments, the materials on them and the histories they hold. The technology required is sure to produce significant advances on Earth, too.

Researchers at the University of Delaware have multiple projects related to these upcoming missions.

A few examples include:

• Tingyi Gu, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Delaware, who is developing electronic circuitry that can withstand the high radiation levels encountered in deep space. She has a NASA Early Career Faculty Award for that project and already has test materials flying outside the International Space Station, a project supported by NASA’s EPSCoR program, to see how six months of radiation exposure in near-Earth orbit affects the silicon photonics, developed by Dun Mao, a graduate student in Gu’s lab, at UD’s Nanofabrication Facility.

• Yuping Zeng, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, is working to develop power management resources for NASA’s Artemis Mission, a critical challenge for establishment of a base on the Earth’s moon. She is testing gallium nitride transistors as promising and efficient semiconductor devices because of advantageous power capability (DC and microwave), radiation insensitivity, high temperature and high frequency operation, optical properties and low-noise capability and has already demonstrated record-high performances.

• Maria Katzarova, associate scientist in the lab of Norm Wagner, Robert L. Pigford Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, is looking for ways to use materials that already are on Earth’s moon or Mars in construction projects that will be necessary there — building launch/landing pads, for example. The goal is to use planetary soil — known as regolith — for these projects and Katzarova aims to develop a formulation of regolith that would function as well as geopolymers, a new class of cement-binding materials with the physical and thermal properties needed in these environments. She is also looking at how such regolith-based cement would flow in these environments and how that would affect 3D printing applications. She is working with graduate student Jennifer Mills and undergraduate Jacob Hewes.