Simulant And Environment Requirements For Space Resources Technology Development

The use of space resources will be necessary for extraplanetary colonization and extended exploration. The most immediately practical uses of space resources are water extraction, oxygen evolution, and manufacturing. Many proposed technologies in this group require melting of the resource, but almost all space technology development has used simulant formulated for geotechnical use in air. A test bed for simulated resource melting through concentrated solar energy application under vacuum was constructed at the Colorado School of Mines. Products from several regolith simulants were compared. The effect on material strength and density due to differing laboratory conditions such as processing in vacuum or ambient air was examined. The results of this study are useful for near term terrestrial technology development for in-situ resource utilization missions, and they may be useful in the future for planning resource utilization missions over the next decade including additive manufacturing with regolith, resource extraction from asteroids, the Moon, and Mars, and other manufacturing techniques using regolith as feed stock.