A new scholarship at New Mexico State University will help advance research capacity in minority institutions and make research funding more competitive. Douglas Cortes, Associate Professor of Civil Engineering at NMSU, has received a two-year scholarship of nearly $ 500,000 from NASA’s Minority University Research and Education Project (MUREP). His project, titled MUREP Advancing Regolith-related Technologies and Education, or MARTE, aims to meet the critical needs of many research and educational efforts by many minority serving institutions in three areas important to NASA: access to reliable and affordable regolith simulants, those commercially available are available mixes that mimic lunar soil, along with test facilities that simulate relevant environmental conditions and analog test sites.
The MUREP Space Technology Artemis Research, or M-STAR Awards, are designed to help NASA support the Artemis Mission’s promise to send the first woman and person of color to the moon and have a robust human and robotic presence there.
“The grant is designed to build research capacity at minority institutions so that we can better compete for funding from NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate,” said Cortes. “We’re looking at the technology that will be needed to effectively have a human presence on the Moon and Mars, and I believe this is the beginning. I don’t see it as the end, I see it as the beginning of something much bigger.
“Our faculty team brings together a wealth of knowledge in the areas of terrestrial granular media characterization, thermo-chemo-mechanical behavior, tool-robot interaction, performance improvement and resource extraction,” he said. “We also share an excitement for expanding our work beyond our home planet to support exploration of the moon and ultimately Mars, and a clear commitment to support and promote STEM education and outreach.”
The project is a university and industry partnership between NMSU, San Diego State University, Spaceport America, AeroAggregates and Russell Sand and Gravel. In addition, three MINT outreach and education partners, the NMSU’s STEM Outreach Center, the New Mexico Alliance for Minority Participation and the New Mexico Space Grant Consortium, as well as a representative of the Space Technology Mission Directorate-funded Lunar Surface Innovation Consortium at John Hopkins University take part.
“This project grew out of the research that Dr. Cortes began in 2015 as part of the National Science Foundation Center for Bio-Mediated and Bio-Inspired Geotechnics, a US $ 18.5 million NSF consortium focused on developing and implementing nature-inspired sustainable solutions to geotechnical engineering and infrastructure problems ” said Lakshmi N. Reddi, dean of the College of Engineering.
Cortes later received funding from NASA and the New Mexico Space Grant Consortium to develop facilities from which to deploy a new generation of lightweight and small self-excavating tools for underground characterization that mimicked the earthworm’s amazing burrowing abilities, which is easy to use Moon and Mars can be transported.
“This line of research has great potential to serve advanced planetary research and develop the future generation of researchers from diverse backgrounds who are part of the NMSU mission,” said Reddi.
“We congratulate Dr. Cortes and the NMSU to win this scholarship. Our team is committed to building our connections with New Mexico universities and working with students and professors as the space economy grows in our region, ”said Scott McLaughlin, Executive Director, Spaceport America.
The research team plans to work with Spaceport America to design, build, and instrument field test infrastructure to study regolith-based building materials for lunar landing and launch pads. The team will also work with the New Mexico Space Grant Consortium to plan, support, and track funding for a lunar landing student challenge. You have plans to develop significant STEM engagement opportunities for middle and high school students, undergraduate and postgraduate students.
Working with industry partners Russell Sand and Gravel and AeroAggregates, Cortes said the project will work to develop, manufacture and store regolith simulants, a material that replicates Earth from the moon needed for research and educational purposes. One of the goals of the project is to build a reliable, affordable, adaptable and scalable supply chain of regolith simulants from New Mexico.
To create test facilities that simulate the conditions of the moon below the surface, the research team plans to design, instrument, assemble, and validate a modular dusty thermal vacuum chamber that will produce a mean vacuum of 10-4 to 10-7 Torr and a temperature of -50 ° Celsius while it is filled with lunar regolith simulant.
Information from NMSU
Comments are closed.