Regolith Properties & Processing

This work is of interest for organizations planning missions that will land on, operate on, and especially attempt to manipulate regolith on planetary surfaces.

Published research

Wilkerson, R. P., D. L. Rickman, J. R. McElderry, S. R. Walker, and K. M. Cannon (2024), On the measurement of shape: With application to lunar regolith. Icarus, 412, 115963.

Cannon, K. M., and R. P. Mueller (2023), Regolith Processing. In: Badescu, V., Zacny, K., Bar-Cohen, Y. (eds) Handbook of Space Resources. Springer, Cham.

Cannon, K. M. (2023), A Lunar Soil Classification System for Space Resource Utilization. Planetary and Space Science, 237, 105780.

Cannon, K. M., C. B. Dreyer, G. F. Sowers, J. Schmit, T. Nguyen, K. Sanny, and J. Schertz (2022). Working with lunar surface materials: Review and analysis of dust mitigation and regolith conveyance technologies. Acta Astronautica, 196, 259-274.

Karl, D., K. M. Cannon, and A. Gurlo (2021). Review of space resources processing for Mars missions: Martian simulants, regolith bonding concepts and additive manufacturing. Open Ceramics, 100216.

Patents

U.S. Patent 12,575,005 B1 — Method for electrolyzing molten regolith (inventor).

Capabilities

This line of research has focused on the detailed properties of regolith on planetary surfaces, and how they affect techniques for excavating, conveying, separating, and processing regolith to produce intermediate and final products.

This includes both compositional properties (bulk chemistry, mineralogy, crystal chemistry, adsorbed gases, etc.) and physical properties (particle size distribution, 3D particle shape, surface cleanliness, etc.). These properties have been characterized in the lab from simulated and real regolith samples, and from orbit on global scales using remote sensing data.

For processing techniques, these have been rigorously traded and assembled into flowsheets, adopting methods from terrestrial mineral processing/beneficiation. Different technologies have been rapidly prototyped with physical hardware, including for flight.

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