Production of High Fidelity Lunar Agglutinate Simulant

Abstract

As space faring nations consider manned and unmanned missions to the Moon, there is a growing need to develop high fidelity lunar regolith simulants that can accurately reproduce the properties and behavior of lunar regolith. Such simulants will be employed to verify the performance of equipment, mechanisms, structures and processes to be used on the lunar surface. One of the significant limitations of current terrestrial-based simulants, such as the popular mare simulant, JSC-1A, is the lack of agglutinates. This paper investigates the production of a lunar mare agglutinate simulant based on JSC-1A. A modified plasma processing technique was used to expose the JSC-1A regolith simulant to high temperatures and transform it to predominantly a glassy phase. Detailed characterization results are presented to confirm that the agglutinate simulant material produced during this investigation reasonably satisfies the primary requirements of an agglutinate simulant such as amorphous/crystalline content, particle size, morphology, vesicular structure, chemistry, and presence of nanophase elemental Fe.

Department(s)

Materials Science and Engineering

Sponsor(s)

NASA Small Business Innovation Research

Keywords and Phrases

Lunar Regolith; Lunar Regolith Simulant; Nanophase Iron; Vesicles; Glass; Lunar soil

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)

0273-1177

Document Type

Article - Journal

Document Version

Citation

File Type

text

Language(s)

English

Rights

© 2011 Elsevier, All rights reserved.

Publication Date

01 Jun 2011

Link to Full Text

Share

 
COinS