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“This video looks at the testing of lunar materials as a possible building material for lunar bases.”
NEW VERSION with improved video & sound:
Public domain film from NASA, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and mild video noise reduction applied.
The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization).
The colonization of the Moon is the proposed establishment of permanent human communities or robot industries on the Moon…
Permanent human habitation on a planetary body other than the Earth is one of science fiction’s most prevalent themes. As technology has advanced, and concerns about the future of humanity on Earth have increased, the argument that space colonization is an achievable and worthwhile goal has gained momentum. Because of its proximity to Earth, the Moon has been seen as the most obvious natural expansion after Earth…
Moon rock describes rock that formed on the Earth’s moon. The term is also loosely applied to other lunar materials collected during the course of human exploration of the Moon…
There are currently three sources of Moon rocks on Earth: 1) those collected by US Apollo missions; 2) samples returned by the Soviet Union Luna missions; and 3) rocks that were ejected naturally from the lunar surface by cratering events and subsequently fell to Earth as lunar meteorites. During the six Apollo surface excursions, 2,415 samples weighing 382 kg (842 lb) were collected, the majority by Apollo 15, 16, and 17. The three Luna spacecraft returned with an additional 0.32 kg (0.7 lb) of samples. Since 1980, over 120 lunar meteorites representing about 60 different meteorite fall events (none witnessed) have been collected on Earth, with a total mass of over 48 kg (105.8 lb). About one third of these were discovered by US and Japanese teams searching for Antarctic meteorites (e.g., ANSMET), with most of the remainder having been discovered by collectors in the desert regions of northern Africa and Oman.
Almost all lunar rocks are depleted in volatiles and are completely lacking in hydrated minerals common in Earth rocks. In some regards, lunar rocks are closely related to Earth’s rocks in their isotopic composition of the element oxygen… In contrast to the Earth, large portions of the lunar crust appear to be composed of rocks with high concentrations of the mineral anorthite. The mare basalts have relatively high iron values. Furthermore, some of the mare basalts have very high levels of titanium (in the form of ilmenite)…
The main repository for the Apollo moon rocks is the Lunar Sample Laboratory Facility at the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. For safe keeping, there is also a smaller collection stored at White Sands Test Facility in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Most of the rocks are stored in nitrogen to keep them free of moisture. They are only handled indirectly, using special tools…
A Lunar regolith simulant is a terrestrial material synthesized in order to approximate the chemical, mechanical, and engineering properties of, and the mineralogy and particle size distributions of, lunar regolith. Lunar regolith simulants are used by researchers…
MLS-1
MLS-1 (Minnesota Lunar Simulant 1) is a lunar simulant that was developed at the University of Minnesota. The basaltic rock used in this simulant was mined from a quarry in Duluth, Minnesota. It contains plagioclase, olivine, pyroxene and ilmenite as some of its major minerals. The minerals and grain sizes resemble the chemistry of the Apollo 11 mare material (specifically soil sample 10084).
JSC-1
JSC-1 (Johnson Space Center Number One)… was developed in 1994… Unlike MLS-1, it simulates a soil that is poor in titanium. It is a basaltic ash with a high glass content.
Toutanji et al. used JSC-1 to create a sulphur-based Lunarcrete simulant.
JSC-1A
In 2005, NASA contracted with Orbital Technologies Corporation (ORBITEC) for a second batch of simulant in three grades:
– JSC-1AF, fine, 27 µm average size
– JSC-1A, a reproduction of JSC 1, less than 1 mm size
– JSC-1AC, coarse, a distribution of sizes less than 5 mm
NASA received 14 metric tons of JSC-1A, and one ton each of AF and AC in 2006. Another 15 tons of JSC-1A and 100 kg of JSC-1F were produced by ORBITEC for commercial sale. An 8 ton sand box of commercial JSC‐1A is available for daily rental from the California Space Authority…
