- Just like a car battery.
- [Matt] This is our simulation
of a Lunar Lander arriving at the moon.
(upbeat music)
- I feel I kinda like that.
- Ready?
- Yep. And 3, 2, 1.
(rushing air)
- Okay.
- Look, as you can tell, it's very, very crude
but there's one extremely accurate part, the dirt.
This is lunar regolith simulant or fake moon soil.
It was made by a lab that's part
of a small but growing cottage industry.
It turns out that soil
on the Moon is nothing like its cousin here on Earth.
It's weird, unpredictable, and even dangerous.
And as more missions aim for the moon
- [Voiceover] Back to the moon and beyond
- Simulant is helping avoid some potentially
catastrophic run-ins with the real stuff.
- [Voiceover] That a little bit fly.
- So these are samples of simulated lunar regolith
which experts will call lunar soil or dirt or dust.
We got these samples by ordering them
on the internet, and the story of why it's so
readily available is actually kind of fascinating.
And it starts with this:
- [Matt] The first samples taken of the Moon
during the Apollo program confirmed
that lunar regolith is strange and nasty stuff.
See, there's no real atmosphere on the moon.
So meteorites have pounded its bedrock into
a mix of sharp jagged particles and lots of dust.
And without wind or rain to weather that down,
the surface stays jagged and dusty forever.
Meteorites also melt the soil on impact
and create little shards of glassy material
called Agglutinate.
And that soil is constantly being baked
by solar wind causing chemical changes
in the minerals themselves.
It's an utterly alien material.
And during the Apollo missions, it got everywhere.
It messed with instrument readings, tore up spacesuits,
clogged equipment, irritated astronauts eyes
and the lungs.
Real bad news.
NASA's solution was to make fake lunar soil here
on Earth to better prep their hardware
before putting it to work on the moon.
Now they've made and tested lots
of simulants over the years, and more recently
have pulled in private businesses to help
with large scale production.
That was a smart move
because these days we're in a bit of a Moon boom.
- [Voiceover] NASA says it's opening a brand new chapter
in lunar exploration
- [Voiceover 2] Beijing's goal to put its own
astronauts on the moon by 2030.
- Four stage engine start.
- [Matt] With Artemis and many other missions
on the horizon. The simulant business is brisk.
- [Anna] Our community does challenge us
and they push us very hard
cause they're like, okay, you know,
I need three kilograms. And we're like, here you go.
And they're like, okay, can you give us like 50?
And we're like, alright, gimme a little bit of time.
We got this.
And then they're like, alright,
so now gimme 50 tons.
- [Matt] Exolith Lab is one of NASA's primary suppliers
of lunar simulants, and they walked us
through their process for making this stuff from scratch.
It starts with a question.
"Where on the moon do you wanna simulate?"
- [Anna] So when you look at the Moon
the lighter regions is what we call the Highlands
and then the Mare regions are the darker spots.
So the mineralology there is pretty different.
- So let's consider this Highland sample,
based on studies of real lunar samples,
the recipe from Exolith is a bunch of anorthosite
a little basalt, and a smidge of ilminite,
pyroxene and olivine.
First, the team sources the raw materials
from mines and other suppliers.
Some of it arrives pre-crushed, other samples not so much.
- [Anna] It's very much like a mining operation.
Some of our materials come in big boulders.
So what we do is we throw them in one crusher
then we throw them in another huge crusher.
We also have to sieve it out.
A lot of the processing that we do
on our materials through the crushing
also helps 'em achieve that desired shape,
that desired jaggedness that we're looking for.
- [Matt] Now, for more of bespoke orders
they can even mix in some simulated aggultinate.
That's the strange glassy material.
Finally, all the ingredients get mixed together
in the proper ratio.
- It's kind of like baking.
What you do is you follow a recipe, you weigh
out the different materials, and then we let it mix
for a while until it's nice and homogeneous.
- Just like that.
You've got moon dirt.
So what are folks actually doing with the simulants?
Well, all kinds of things.
They're figuring out how to dig into it, navigate rovers
through it, grow plants in it, extract oxygen from it.
All the things we need to do to spend more time on the Moon.
Now, no one stimulant is a perfect stand-in for
all of those experiments.
It's just too hard to make a replica that's perfect
in every way.
But different stimulants can get pretty close
on individual features like the size
and shape of particles or of the chemical composition.
So researchers can order the right stimulants
for the right test.
- Rolling.
- This is gonna shake a lot.
- [Matt] Learning about all that work inspired us to
do something with our samples.
So we thought we'd look at a problem that could really
jeopardize our long-term plans on the moon.
It starts when you point a rocket engine
and all that dusty, jagged regolith.
- That was insane.
- Nice.
(laughing)
- When you try to land a rocket on the moon
the rocket exhaust is coming
out at thousands of meters per second.
- [Matt] Phil Medsker and his colleagues have spent
20 odd years studying what happens next
which looks roughly like this.
When rocket exhaust hits the moon, it sends
up a huge plume of high speed regolith
like it would on Earth if you were to
land a rocket somewhere without a launchpad.
But with low gravity
and no real atmosphere, that soil travels.
- [Phillip] There is no distance
on the Moon that is far enough away to be safe
from some particles hitting at that distance.
- [Matt] Meaning smaller particles
from a single landing can shoot across the entire moon
- And therefore anything that's exposed
to that spray is gonna be hit
by particles going thousands of meters per second.
- [Matt] We actually even have an example of
this in November of 1969, Apollo 12 touched down near
Surveyor 3, which is an uncrewed NASA craft that
landed a couple years before.
- They landed 160 meters away, because
at the time they thought that was far enough away
so that the rocket exhaust wouldn't damage the Surveyor.
Turns out that was, you know, a vast
vast under prediction of how far the ejector goes.
So when they got the pieces back from Surveyor 3 back
to Earth, they found out they were completely sandblasted.
The coatings were worn off.
The paint was completely penetrated
and filled with lunar dust particles.
It completely eroded the entire surface of the Surveyor.
- [Matt] As the lunar economy heats up
and the moon gets more crowded,
these tiny little particles could cause bigger
and bigger problems.
Damage from regolith plumes could cost a lot of money,
put future missions at risk,
even cause geopolitical trouble.
- Because if one country lands on the moon
and then sandblasts and damages the
hardware of another country
then technically you're violating the Outer Space Treaty
because you're not allowed to do any harm
to other countries assets in space.
There's also a concern
about countries claiming an excessively large blast zone
which could be a way to get around the Outer Space Treaty
and claim defacto territory on the Moon.
- [Matt] Fortunately, there are lots of solutions
on the table.
You could standardize landing zones
for everybody, using the Moon's
hills and valleys as shields.
Even building launch pads out of regolith.
And simulant is powering a lot of that R and D.
NASA's busy testing regolith based construction materials
and doing much more thoughtful versions
of our little experiment.
There's still a lot more work to be done
but Phil says there's also been a lot more recognition
of the issue than there used to be, which feels like a win.
- If there was anything that I could consider to
be my life's work, I think that would be it.
But yeah, I feel really good
about where we are and where it's been so far.
- Of course, humanity has its sight set
farther than the Moon and we have regolith for that too.
I mean, here's some Mars regolith full
of different minerals and properties.
The point is, the need for this stuff isn't going anywhere
and there's a virtuous cycle to it too.
I mean, the more stimulant that's available
the more gets used here on Earth
and maybe more missions happen out there
- [Anna] The more that people have access to doing things
like this kind of research with our stuff, the more
it's gonna perpetuate that curiosity.
So I do feel like being a part of it as it's happening
- [Voiceover] And lift off of Artemis 1.
- [Anna] and then also helping it become more available
to everyone is gonna kind of make that happen even
more rapidly.
- So imagine being
on a planet covered in this stuff.
Sweeping forever.
- Don't sweep up the Lunar Lander. Lunar Rover. (laughing)