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Manufacture and characterization of sintered icy lunar regolith simulants, and implications for space resources and planetary science, The
Johnson, Daniel K. M.
Johnson, Daniel K. M.
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2024
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The future expansion of humanity into the solar system will be accelerated or limited by the use of celestial resources in-situ, or lack thereof. The first major stepping stone of space resources use is the Moon, which can provide, among other things, metals and water, the vast majority of the mass needed to manufacture rockets and fill them with propellant, as well as to construct habitats and support life within them. Prospecting is needed to prove lunar water ice reserves, which will be followed by excavating icy lunar regolith, and extracting the volatiles from within it. Before any of these activities can be performed, icy lunar regolith must be characterized and understood, beginning with the emplacement and modification of water ice in lunar cold traps. In this thesis, work is presented detailing the current scientific understanding of lunar ice emplacement, modification, and persistence, and previous methods used to produce simulated icy lunar regolith is presented. Then, novel icy lunar regolith simulants, Pressure Sintered icy lunar regolith Simulant (PSS), Thermally Sintered icy lunar regolith Simulant (TSS), and Vacuum Sintered icy lunar regolith Simulant (VSS) are characterized, both for their bulk mechanical properties and microstructure. These novel simulants are compared to wet mix, and shown to be fundamentally different in every metric considered (bulk density, porosity, penetration resistance, and microstructural texture). Accordingly, I have found that the manner in which ice interacts with lunar regolith is much more important than the amount of ice present for defining the bulk behavior of the material. This dependency is based on the interaction of ice and regolith at the micro scale, which I have shown with micro CT scans of various icy lunar regolith samples.
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