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Near Earth Asteroids (NEAs) are thought to contain a wealth of resources, including water, iron, titanium, nickel, platinum and silicates. Future space missions that can exploit these resources by performing In-Situ Resource Utilization…

The exploration of small body asteroids provides direct access to the primitive building blocks of our solar system. Sample and return missions enable chemical and radioisotope studies which not only provide evidence for the formation of…

In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) is one of the key technologies for enabling sustainable access to the Moon. The ability to excavate lunar regolith is the first step in making lunar resources accessible and usable. This work presents the…

To establish a self-sustained human presence in space and to explore deeper into the solar system, extensive research has been conducted on In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) systems. Past studies have proposed and researched many…

When creating asteroid regolith simulant, it is necessary to have a model of asteroid regolith to guide and to evaluate the simulant. We created a model through evaluation and synthesis of the available data sets including (1) the returned…

Asteroid mining offers the possibility to revolutionize supply of resources vital for human civilization. Preliminary analysis suggests that Near-Earth Asteroids (NEA) contain enough volatile and high value minerals to make the mining…

Near-Earth small-body mission targets 162173 Ryugu, 101955 Bennu, and 25143 Itokawa produce gravity fields around 4 orders of magnitude below that of Earth and their irregular shapes, combined with rotational effects produce varying surface…

There are thousands of asteroids in near-Earth space and millions expected in the Main Belt. They are diverse in their physical properties and compositions. They are also time capsules of the early Solar System making them valuable for…

[Abridged] Asteroid mining is not necessarily a distant prospect. Hayabusa2 and OSIRIS-REx have recently rendezvoused with near-Earth asteroids and will return samples to Earth. While there is significant science motivation for these…

The dusty regolith covering the surfaces of asteroids and planetary satellites differs in size, shape, and composition from terrestrial soil particles and is subject to very different environmental conditions. Experimental studies of the…

Owing to the extremely low gravity of small near-Earth asteroids (NEAs), it has been assumed that impact-generated rock fragments escape into space and thus do not contribute to the accumulation of regolith. However, centimeter-sized stones…

Exploration of small bodies, namely comets and asteroids remain a challenging endeavor due to their low gravity. The risk is so high that missions such as Hayabusa II and OSIRIS-REx will be performing touch and go missions to obtain…

We present recent improvements in the simulation of regolith sampling processes in microgravity using the numerical particle method smooth particle hydrodynamics (SPH). We use an elastic-plastic soil constitutive model for large deformation…

Water has been identified as a critical resource both to sustain human-life but also for use in propulsion, attitude-control, power, thermal and radiation pro-tection systems. Water may be obtained off-world through In-Situ Resource…

In situ observations of small asteroids show that surfaces covered by boulders and coarse terrain are frequent on such bodies. Regolith grain sizes have distributions on approximately mm and cm scales, and the behavior of such large grains…

The preliminary mission design of spacecraft missions to asteroids often involves, in the early phases, the selection of candidate target asteroids. The final result of such an analysis is a list of asteroids, ranked with respect to the…

Modeling has been developed to support the development of volatile extraction technologies for the Moon, Mars, asteroids, or other bodies. This type of modeling capability is important to avoid the high cost of multiple test campaigns in…

In order for off-Earth top surface structures built from regolith to protect astronauts from radiation, they need to be several meters thick. Technical University Delft (TUD) proposes to excavate into the ground to create subsurface…

This study is carried out in the framework of sample-return missions to asteroids that use a low-speed projectile as the primary component of its sampling mechanism (e.g., JAXA's Hayabusa and Hayabusa2 missions). We perform numerical…

There are thousands of asteroids in near-Earth space and millions in the Main Belt. They are diverse in physical properties and composition and are time capsules of the early solar system. This makes them strategic locations for planetary…