To satisfy the essential needs, including energy requirements, for human and robotic space explorations on planetary objects like Moon, Mars and asteroids, the proper exploitation of resources available in-situ represents a crucial issue.

Along this line, the present work, a collaboration between University of Cagliari, CNR-INO and INAF-Astrophysical Observatory of Arcetri, taking a lunar regolith simulant as a case-study, assessed the potential of sintered regolith for solar energy harvesting and thermal energy storage within an ISRU perspective.

The paper is published on Acta Astronautica.

Roberta Licheri, Roberto Orrù, Elisa Sani, Aldo Dell’Oro, Giacomo Cao
Spark plasma sintering and optical characterization of lunar regolith simulant
Acta Astronautica, vol. 201 (2022), pages 164–171
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actaastro.2022.09.016