講者：Assoc. Prof. Aloke Kumar Department of Mechanical Engineering, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India

講題：Extra-terrestrial Habitats for Humanity – Building for the Moon and Mars

時間：2025年05月12號(星期一)11:00~12:30
地點：國立成功大學生醫卓群大樓 1樓 鳳杯講堂 FENG-PEI Lecture Hall, 1st Floor, Center of Biomedical Excellency & Synergy, NCKU  

主辦單位：國立成功大學基礎醫學研究所 Institute of Basic Medical Science, NCKU、國立成功大學生物醫學工程學系 Department of Biomedical Engineering, NCKU

演講摘要：

What will future colonies on Moon and Mars look like? As the world enters Space Age 2.0, questions like these are becoming hard scientific questions and the possibility of such colonies is becoming quite real. In today’s talk, I will share with you some of our exciting work in this domain such as space bricks and biological payloads. To create space bricks, we utilized extra-terrestrial regolith and a process called biomineralization. Biomineralization refers to the process of mineral precipitation due to chemical alteration of the environment induced by the biological activity. For unicellular organisms such as bacteria, the biomineralization process can be either extracellular or intracellular. Microbially induced calcite precipitation (MICP) is an excellent example of an extracellular mineral deposition. I will present our findings on how MICP can be employed for both hardening of extra-terrestrial regolith into ‘space bricks’. I will further discuss some of our designs for extra-terrestrial colonies and how fundamental research on Earth could be useful for these futuristic goals. I will also discuss some of our translational work on payload design towards these goals.

Bio: Dr. Aloke Kumar received his Bachelors and Masters degrees from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India in 2005 and his Ph.D in Mechanical Engineering from Purdue University, West Lafayette, USA in 2010. Dr. Kumar joined University of Alberta’s Mechanical Engineering Department in 2013, where he was the Canada Research Chair in Microfluidics for Biological Systems. He moved to the Indian Institute of Science in 2017, where he has re-established his lab with a focus on non-Newtonian flows and space technology.