With all deference to the book and movie “The Martian”, wouldn’t you, as part of an interplanetary expedition, prefer to be protected from the radiation, micro-meteorites and extreme temperature fluctuations of the Moon or Martian surface? Though some of the hazards depicted in “The Martian” are way over-dramatized (the thin Martian atmosphere wouldn’t sustain the depicted raging storms), there are still hazards aplenty on the surface. So why not site your habitat in a cozy lava tube, protected from many of those surface nasties.
At least that’s some of the reasoning behind a European Space Agency (ESA) effort to map a portion of Spanish lava tube in centimeter-scale detail as part of the ESA’s 2017 Pangaea-X campaign. Some chambers in the 8 km long La Cueva de los Verdes lava tube are large enough to hold residential streets and houses (or a prototype Martian research station/habitat). In less than 3 hours the cave research team mapped the lava tube using the smallest and lightest imaging scanner on the market and a wearable backpack mapper that collects geometric data without a satellite and synchronizes images collected by five cameras and two 3D imaging laser profilers.
While the data is still being analyzed, ESA has released this ghostly fly-thru of a 1.3 km portion of the lava tube. Click the play button and prepare to take a pseudo-trip to Mars.
So, the next time you visit a cave or lava tube, especially a large one, imagine yourself in a spacesuit on the Moon or Mars and realize that you’re actually an inner-space explorer. But don’t be too surprised at the creatures you may run into, they’re just other inner-space explorers too.