Solar Sintering for Lunar Additive Manufacturing

Understanding and Mitigating Plume Effects During Powered Descents on the Moon and Mars

“…For this reason, landing pads are probably the most important technical and civil engineering structure needed for growth of human activity on the Moon and Mars. Many ideas exist, but few are above a technology readiness level (TRL) of 2 or 3; these include regolith sintering, regolith brick construction and laying, lunar concrete, and alumina injected thruster plumes (Lin et al, 1997;Hintze and Quintana 2013;Mueller et al, 2016, Davis et al, 2017Meurisse et al, 2018;Fateri et al, 2019;Kuhns, 2020). Inherent limitations of terrestrial testing, and the challenges of the ultra-high vacuum lunar environment, will require the validation of developed techniques on small-scale surface missions to find solutions in the near future.…”

Invention of Indian Moon Soil (Lunar Highland Soil Simulant) for Chandrayaan Missions

“…Obviously, transporting of such building materials from the Earth is neither practically possible nor financially feasible. Therefore, it is expected that the simulant LSS-ISAC-1 can be preferred to make "building blocks" for the study of future lunar structures so that local regolith can be used as a novel concept of in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) towards future lunar habitations [9,22,23]. 4.…”

“…These lunar simulants can be broadly classified into two types, namely mare land and highland soil simulants, representing lunar soils in the mare and highland regions of the Moon, respectively. Matching of bulk chemistry and mineralogy of the simulants with respect to actual lunar soil is very important to carry out further research and development works in the context of Moon colonization, as it falls in line with in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) of regolith [7][8][9]. The planned Chandrayaan Missions of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) included the surface exploration at the South Polar Region of the Moon to demonstrate the ability to soft-land and to operate a robotic rover on the lunar surface, apart from studying the lunar topography, mineralogy, elemental abundance, lunar exosphere, the thickness of lunar regolith and to map the lunar surface along with preparing 3D maps, etc.…”

Spark plasma sintering and optical characterization of lunar regolith simulant

“…To this aim, efficient technologies to convert natural regolith into bulk bodies are needed. In this regard, various methods, such as pressureless sintering [14], [15], microwave sintering [16]- [18], combustion synthesis based processes [19]- [22], impact procedure [23], high-pressure consolidation [24], spark plasma sintering [14], [25], [26], solar sintering [27], 3D-printing [28], etc., are considered in the literature. To facilitate powder densification, suitable polymers are also used as binders in some investigations [23], [24].…”