(This story originally appeared in on Feb 26, 2018)

BENGALURU: In what is likely to become India ’s biggest science programme in the next few years, Isro has started work on building igloos on the moon. These ‘lunar habitats’, as scientists call them, will be built by sending robots and 3D printers to the moon, and by using lunar soil and other material.The project has seen progress with a working model — created using a 3D printer — sitting in the space agency’s lunar terrain test facility. Scientists have drawn up five designs of the lunar habitats, and hope their work could contribute to plans of creating outposts on the moon.Isro Satellite Centre (Isac) director M Annadurai likened the igloos on the moon to India’s outpost in Antarctica.“We are planning to use the moon as an outpost — like missions in Antarctica. In the long run, the space station is likely to be scrapped. Many countries, including the US, are considering building more permanent structures on the moon and working out of there. When that happens, we want India to have contributed,” he said. He added that astronauts going to the Earth’s satellite in the future will spend more than just a few hours there.Annadurai said the space agency has mastered the process of creating lunar simulant (material that approximate the properties of lunar soil), and it has about 60 tonnes of it.Its properties match 99.6% with the samples brought from the moon by Apollo missions. “In 2004, we had purchased 10kg of lunar simulant at $150 a kg from the US for tests. Later, we found some raw material for that had gone from Salem in Tamil Nadu . We found those rocks and developed a process to make the soil here. Today, we have thousands of kilograms with us and it cost us a fraction of what it would have had we purchased it. Anyway, no country could part with the quantities we need,” added Annadurai.Senior scientist and project lead I Venugopal has applied for a global patent for the process of manufacturing the lunar simulant.Thanks to this technology, Isro has been able to manufacture 60 tonnes of the simulant at Rs 10 lakh.