Developing Glassy Magnets From Simulated Composition of Moon/Mars Regolith for Exploration Applications (Invited Paper) (Ribbon Award Winner)

The feasibility of preparing glasses and developing glass-ceramic materials that display magnetic characteristics using the simulated compositions of Lunar and Martian regoliths have been demonstrated. The reported results are preliminary at this time, and are part of a larger ongoing research activity at the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) with an overall goal aimed at (i) developing glass, ceramic and glass-ceramic type materials from the Lunar and Martian soil compositions in their respective simulated atmospheric conditions, (ii) exploring the potential application areas of these materials through extensive materials characterization, and (iii) further improving the related materials properties through a variation of the processing methods. This research activity is an important component of NASA’s current space exploration program, which encourages feasibility studies for materials development using in situ resources on planetary bodies to meet the technological and scientific needs of future human habitats on these extra terrestrial outposts. This paper presents an overview of this on-going work at NASA (MSFC) and reports on a few selected results obtained to date.

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