ORLANDO, Fla. — There’s an Oviedo warehouse just north of the University of Central Florida that looks normal enough on the outside, but inside its staff and students are creating something otherworldly.
Alien dirt — or regolith simulant — is the main product of UCF’s Exolith Lab and is gaining huge demand as the next era of space exploration and projects like NASA’s moonshot Artemis missions prepare to blast off.
In 2018 the lab produced a little more than 1,000 pounds of regolith to the scientific community. Last year the UCF lab hit pay dirt as demand avalanched into 40 tons — 80,000 pounds — of regolith. Most orders demand lunar soil, but the lab also produces simulated soil of Mars, asteroids, Mercury and other celestial rocks.
But what does dirt have to do with soaring beyond Earth’s sky? Everything, if you ask Exolith Lab director Dan Britt.
“There’s renewed interest in space exploration, particularly lunar exploration,” Britt said. “What the Exolith Lab does is try to support this movement by producing a standardized, reliable, high fidelity simulated versions of what you run into on the surfaces of alien worlds.”
Space exploration is all about anticipating problems and one of the biggest problems scientists face in landing spacecraft or rovers on alien worlds is that they have almost no idea how a new world’s surface may respond to their equipment.
When astronauts for the Apollo program need to land on the moon, Cornell professor Tommy Gold raised concerns that its dusty layer could be as deep as 32 feet, Britt recalled. To avoid burying the astronauts alive, NASA launched its surveyor series of lunar robotic landers, confirming the moon could support the smalls steps and giant leaps of mankind.
“The whole point of exploring smart is to minimize surprises and to go after the stuff we really don’t know about rather than the stuff that we could have figured out if we had stopped and thought a little bit,” Britt said.
NASA is one of the lab’s biggest buyers and purchases lunar and Martian regolith for all kinds of experiments since the lab’s beginnings.
Exolith Lab first started developing its library of dirt in 2015 as a small business innovation research project funded by NASA and functioned as a partnership between UCF and a small startup company, Deep Space Industries. In the early days, Exolith staffers would prepare one bowl of regolith at a time inside a small classroom lab. The lab has changed locations several times to accommodate a rise in demand. Last year, as demand reached an all-time high, the lab moved from its small warehouse on Forsyth Road to its current 6,000-square-foot Oviedo location.
Baking moon dirt
So how do scientists who have never left the planet create alien dirt?
There’s nothing new under the sun. That is to say all the elements you might find in foreign regolith are familiar enough to Earthly scientists, but they might be arranged in different ways than we’re used to, Britt said.
The reason why is the same reason life is possible: oxygen. It’s necessary for life, but its nature as a corrosive element profoundly changed the makeup of Earth’s surface. So in order to stir up a batch of moon dirt you have to get creative with pulling ingredients from different spots on Earth, said Exolith Lab director of operations Anna Metke.
Exolith’s lunar highland regolith is made up of rocks from Greenland, Idaho and Arizona, chunks of rock lab officials say don’t occur elsewhere on Earth. Lunar highland simulant has two major minerals, anorthosite and basalt, Metke said. The former is used for its lightness as a mineral and the latter gives the regolith its dark and fine qualities.
“So when you mix them together, it gets that perfect lunar look,” Metke said. “It’s like mixing together your flour, sugar and everything else. Once it’s all homogenous, you’re good to go. And after that, we go straight into packaging.”
Since demand exploded in recent years, the lab began investing in industrial cement mixers and rock crushers to facilitate the process.
“A little bit after 2018 we kind of realized that it was time to realize that this demand from the community is not going to go away,” Metke said. “We went from using small rock crushers that would fit on like your office table, to rock crushers that are the size of your car.”
Preparing for the moon
Lining one of the walls of Exolith is a box about waist-level high with an ultraviolet light inside shining down over several, tiny French marigold plants defiantly sprouting out of lunar soil. It’s part of the lab’s plant-growth project headed by Steven Elseid, a UCF senior graduating this summer with a biology degree. Usually, regolith is hard on plants and getting anything to grow is quite a feat.
“I’m honestly not 100% sure how they grew,” Elseid said still astonished by the result, but was planning on running another experiment to better understand how it happened. Among many experiments, using regolith for plant growth is big reason scientific companies are interested in buying regolith simulants. Exolith supplies all of the material for NASA’s outreach program Plant the Moon Challenge the last two years. The space agency ordered another two tons for its program next fall, which now features challenges to grow in Martian soil.
NASA’s Ames Research Center also ordered an additional 20 tons of lunar simulant to test its water-hunting rover VIPER’s mechanical and optical systems ahead of the future Artemis III mission, which seeks to land the first woman on the moon. In January, Ames announced VIPER successfully clocked 25 miles of movement in a high-tech sandbox filled with lunar regolith running through a battery of tests including simulated slopes, wheel slips, and traveling terrain the size, shape and distribution of rocks the rover will encounter on the moon.
“Lunar regolith is fluffy due to the low gravity and lack of most weathering processes, and the particles are sharp like broken glass,” said Arno Rogg, a rover mobility system engineer at NASA. “All that presented some real engineering challenges to designing a lightweight, performant and robust wheel for the half-ton rover.”
A small company owned by Blue Horizon ordered a simulant of dirt from Phobos, a Martian moon, for a drilling experiment it plans in the future. Previously, it was using peanut and walnut shells as surface. Britt explained they were bound to see some funky results if they used their equipment on the real deal. As much as the lab is a producer of soil, it also functions to teach engineers about geology, which seems to be growing in appreciation as much as the demand for the lab’s products, Britt said.
“With all the growing activity in the new space industry and in NASA, it means that they’re actually having to address these questions. They’re designing hardware, testing hardware and they’re going, ‘How do we do this?’” Britt said. “That’s one of the roles that we play.”
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