Energy-efficient regolith compactor for surface construction

The objective of the project was to design, develop and test the compaction device breadboard in a regolith simulant testbed. An experimental test campaign aimed to verify that the compaction device can be successfully used to improve the surface geotechnical properties of two different regolith simulants: GreenSpar-250 analogous to lunar Highlands, and AGK-2010 analogous to lunar Mare regions.The activity investigated the compaction as a viable large-scale horizontal construction method on the Moon, as previously proposed in Phillips et al. (1992), and utilised terrestrial analogies (Chen & Fang, 2008) along with best practices (Kwaśniewski et al., 2022) for compaction performance monitoring. The current improved design of the device (TRL 4) could be further studied and developed for a lunar use-case scenario, as lunar surface exploration capabilities and needs intensify within the following decades.