Authors: Jackson Wiley, Sarah Barclay Cribb, and Dante Piscitiello
Faculty Mentor: Dr. Qiushi Chen
College: College of Engineering, Computing and Applied Sciences
NASA’s upcoming Artemis program aims to return humans to the moon where they will drill Lunar regolith to gather materials for in-situ resource utilization, which will produce needed materials for Lunar exploration. The objective of this project is to use Lunar regolith simulants to understand the geotechnical, mineralogical, and chemical aspects of Lunar regolith and compile data on lunar regolith simulants into an organized database. An important geotechnical property of Lunar regolith is its particle-size distribution (PSD), and in this research, the PSDs of all existing Lunar regolith and regolith simulants are compiled. The research process involved digitizing images of PSD curves, taking the curve data, and modeling the curve in Excel. Researching Lunar regolith simulant databases and other scientific references was necessary to compile a mineral and chemical database of Lunar regolith simulants. The limitation of using terrestrial materials leads to a variety of chemical and mineral composition among different Lunar regolith simulants. Understanding the differences among these simulants and their intended purposes is essential to conducting accurate research on Lunar regolith. Existing Lunar drilling tools and numerical modeling tools are also explored and will be topics of future research.
Jackson Wiley 2020 Undergraduate Research Symposium
