Abstract
NASA has revealed that they plan to resume manned missions and ensure the permanent presence of people in the so-called habitats on the Moon by 2024. Moon habitats are expected to be built using local resources—it is planned to use lunar regolith as aggregate in lunar concrete. Lunar concrete design requires a new approach in terms of both the production technology and the operating conditions significantly different from the Earth. Considering that more and more often it is assumed that the water present on the Moon in the form of ice might be used to maintain the base, but also to construct the base structure, the authors decided to investigate slightly more traditional composites than the recently promoted sulfur and polymer composites thermally hardened and cured. Numerous compositions of cement “lunar micro-mortars” and “lunar mortars” were made and tested to study rheological properties, namely, the consistency, which largely depend on the morphology of the fine-grained filler, i.e., regolith. For obvious reasons, the lunar regolith simulant (LRS) was used in place of the original Moon regolith. The used LRS mapped the grain size distribution and morphology of the real lunar regolith. It was created for the purpose of studying the erosive effect of dusty regolith fractions on the moving parts of lunar landers and other mechanical equipment; therefore, it simulated well the behavior of regolith particles in relation to cement paste. The obtained results made it possible to develop preliminary compositions for “lunar mortars” (possible to apply in, e.g., 3D concrete printing) and to prepare, test, and evaluate mortar properties in comparison to traditional quartz mortars (under the conditions of the Earth laboratory).
Highlights
On 21 July 1966, the first manned mission landed on the Moon (Apollo 11) [1]
The simple micrograph confirmed that the tested lunar regolith simulant is characterized by sharp-edged particles, as assumed during production, which enables a good simulation of the mixing of the components of the lunar micro-mortars and mortars
The quartz powder, is a bit finer than lunar regolith simulant (LRS). It contains particles smaller than 1 μm, the median is 21.5 μm (42% smaller than the median of LRS), average size and mode are about 30 μm, and maximal size slightly exceeds 150 μm. All these results indicate that the quartz powder has a much larger (1.77× larger) specific surface area than the LRS, which makes LRS a more advantageous mortar micro-filler than the quartz powder described above
Summary
On 21 July 1966, the first manned mission landed on the Moon (Apollo 11) [1]. In 2016, the 50th anniversary of this event was celebrated, which reawakened interest in the Moon and space travel. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has revealed plans to resume manned missions to the Moon: mission Artemis III is planned to be the first crewed lunar landing since Apollo 17 in 1972—the crew is to land on the Moon by 2024, and by 2028, it is planned to implement sustainable exploration of the Moon [2,3,4]. In order to implement such an unusual construction project as a base/habitat on the Moon, many factors need to be considered, including advanced economical, technological, and material engineering aspects. The latter two are closely related and limited by the former, because the cost of transporting cargo to the Moon, it has decreased in recent years, is still calculated in the tens of thousands of dollars. In 2020, NASA announced a tender for a transport service to the Moon (service delivery until 2023) of the VIPER mobile robot, which will search for water (ice) at one of the Moon’s poles [4]
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