ScienceDaily
Regolith
The layer of broken rock and dust covering an airless world — and a serious engineering problem.
With no wind or water to round it off, the surface of the Moon or an asteroid is a blanket of fragments smashed by billions of years of micrometeorite impacts. Lunar regolith is abrasive, statically charged, and shaped like broken glass; on Apollo it wore through the outer layer of the spacesuits in three days, jammed seals, and made the crews cough. It is also the most abundant resource on the Moon — a source of oxygen, metals and shielding for anyone who intends to stay — which makes learning to handle it one of the actual prerequisites for a permanent base rather than a detail.
Where it has come up lately
Astronomy Magazine
Universe Today
Astronomy Magazine
Universe Today
Phys.org
Related terms
Gravity assist
Stealing a fraction of a planet's orbital momentum to go faster for free.
Sample return
Bringing a piece of somewhere else back to a laboratory on Earth.
Opposition and conjunction
The two alignments that decide when a planet is worth looking at and when it is unreachable.
Tidal locking
When a body's spin has been dragged into matching its orbit, so one face never turns away.
Questions
What is Regolith?
The layer of broken rock and dust covering an airless world — and a serious engineering problem.
Why does it matter?
Lunar regolith is abrasive, statically charged, and shaped like broken glass; on Apollo it wore through the outer layer of the spacesuits in three days, jammed seals, and made the crews cough. It is also the most abundant resource on the Moon — a source of oxygen, metals and shielding for anyone who intends to stay — which makes learning to handle it one of the actual prerequisites for a permanent base rather than a detail.