[SpaceProgram] Introduction & Leightweight probes

[Bradley Grzesiak]

Speaking as a former ORBITEC employee and lunar mining engineer, I can say
a few things about the regolith simulant.

First, it's *really* fine. Like affect-your-lungs fine. I recommend a
simple $2 paper mask, which should suffice. Second, it's not quite as
microscopically jagged as the real stuff, but they do a pretty good job.
Basically, you're not really going to get any agglutinates (fused grains)
that you would from real regolith.

But it's the closest (by far) you'll get anywhere. And no, they don't just
dig it up and ship it out. There's quite a bit of post-processing to get
the correct grain-size distribution.

:brad


On Mon, Apr 16, 2012 at 11:49 AM, cole santos <cksantos85 at gmail.com> wrote:

> moon regolith, epic, thanks for the link
>
> that could be useful for many projects. we have some areas here in
> hawaii that are commonly used as moon and mars simulation areas.
> Mostly old lava flows.
>
> On Mon, Apr 16, 2012 at 6:27 AM, Luke Weston <reindeerflotilla at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >> What would be interesting: Grow bacteria on nothing but moon soil. Taake
> >> some soil, add water, atmosphere and bacteria. Will they thrive? -> If
> so,
> >> phosphorus etc. is in the moon soil.
> >>
> >
> > We already know a great deal about the geology and mineralogy of the
> > moon, and the chemical composition of the lunar regolith.
> >
> > There's no wheel there that needs to be reinvented, and no fundamental
> > new discovery that needs to be made.
> >
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_soil
> >
> > You can also commercially buy standard JSC-1A lunar regolith simulant
> > from Orbitec, which is interesting:
> >
> > http://www.orbitec.com/store/simulant.html
> >
> > They even have Mars regolith simulant too :)
> >
> > There is some existing research and literature in this area,
> > indicating that certain types of life, such as cyanobacteria, will
> > grow on lunar regolith (or simulant) when water (and other factors
> > such as light, if appropriate) is added along with an appropriate
> > artificial atmosphere.
> >
> > For example:
> >
> > http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2008/pdf/1673.pdf
> >
> > If you got some regolith simulant, autoclaved it or something to make
> > sure it's sterile (along with all your other equipment and vessel, got
> > some sort of benign sample of appropriate bacteria or cyanobacteria
> > from an appropriate biology supplier (ATCC or whatever the go-to
> > people are for that sort of thing these days) and supplied an
> > appropriate gaseous atmosphere from a gas cylinder, and added some
> > distilled water, and supplied some light on the vessel, I suppose it
> > wouldn't be too difficult to reproduce such an experiment.
> > Interesting.
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-- 
Bradley Grzesiak
co-founder, bendyworks llc
http://bendyworks.com/
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