Scientists are rapidly advancing methods to transform regolith—the loose rock and dust covering moons and asteroids—into usable resources for space habitats and agriculture. Current research spans extracting oxygen through solar chemistry, cultivating crops in Martian soil simulants, and engineering lunar infrastructure directly from planetary dust.
·Solar chemistry methods now extract oxygen from regolith, enabling in-situ resource utilization for lunar and Mars missions
·Microorganisms and fungi survive and grow in Martian regolith simulants, suggesting potential for sustainable crop production on the red planet
·Avalanche analysis on asteroid Vesta reveals new insights into how regolith behaves and moves on low-gravity bodies
·Lunar infrastructure blueprints propose building habitats and structures directly from moon dust rather than transporting materials from Earth
·Tardigrades demonstrate short-term survival in Martian regolith conditions, informing biological tolerance thresholds for future missions
drawn from Phys.org, Texas A&M Stories, Payload Space, Nature · updated 1d ago