Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
Lunar regolith sample collected by China's Chang'e 5 mission displayed at Airshow China 2021. On 16 December 2020, China's Chang'e 5 mission returned to Earth with about 2 kilograms of rock and dirt it picked up from the Moon. It is the first lunar regolith sample to return to Earth since 1976.
The term lunar soil is often used interchangeably with "lunar regolith" but typically refers to the finer fraction of regolith, that which is composed of grains one centimetre in diameter or less. Some have argued that the term " soil " is not correct in reference to the Moon because soil is defined as having organic content, whereas the Moon ...
The regolith contains rocks, fragments of minerals from the original bedrock, and glassy particles formed during the impacts. In most of the lunar regolith, half of the particles are made of mineral fragments fused by the glassy particles; these objects are called agglutinates. The chemical composition of the regolith varies according to its ...
The cement would be manufactured by beneficiating lunar rock that had a high calcium content. Water would either be supplied from off the Moon, or by combining oxygen with hydrogen produced from lunar soil. [2] Lin et al. used 40g of the lunar regolith samples obtained by Apollo 16 to produce lunarcrete in 1986. [6]
The lunar soil is composed of a blend of silica and iron-containing compounds that may be fused into a glass-like solid using microwave radiation. [92] [93] The European Space Agency working in 2013 with an independent architectural firm, tested a 3D-printed structure that could be constructed of lunar regolith for use as a Moon base.
The high bay was furnished with a lunar soil testing facility, [14] [15] the "Big Bin", which is thought to be the world's largest indoor, climate controlled lunar regolith chamber [16] and contains 120 tons of BP-1 simulated lunar soil. [17]
Building the lunar base inside a deep crater would provide at least partial shielding against radiation and micrometeoroids. Artificial magnetic fields have been proposed [ 61 ] [ 62 ] as a means to provide radiation shielding for long range deep space crewed missions, and it might be possible to use similar technology on a lunar habitat.
In the particular case of the Moon, this is more often known as lunar gardening. Planetary bodies lacking an atmosphere will generally also lack any erosional processes, with the possible exception of volcanism , and as a result impact debris accumulates at the object's surface as a rough "soil," commonly referred to as regolith .