SBIR-STTR Award

Up to 65% of the lunar soils are comprised of agglutinates. Although the importance of agglutinate in simulants is often debated, the fact is that agglutinates account for a large portion of the lunar soil and have known effects on final material properties. Increasing the fidelity of terrestrially manufactured simulant can reduce mission risk. Zybek Advanced Products, Inc., is proposing an important innovation to the agglutinate manufacturing process to address mission-critical needs for lunar regolith simulants that achieve NASA's cost and quantity objectives, provide reproducible production processes, and supply required particle size distributions. Additional value is provided to the program by ZAP's unique knowledge of simulant mechanical and material properties gleaned from its production of simulant components for NASA. The majority of ZAP's work completed to date has been focused on high volume, bulk lunar simulant components, including glass, agglutinates and melt breccias. The primary purpose of this SBIR proposal is to innovate the agglutinate manufacturing process to provide significantly higher quality material that will contain nanostructure Fe0. This innovation will leverage ZAP's current investment in the high-volume simulant manufacturing and provide the industry with more accurate simulants that will reduce future mission risks.

The technical objectives of this program are to develop a cost-effective process to deliver Celestial body simulants for the foreseeable future. Specifically, the technical objectives of this project are:• Deliver 3 metric tons of a lunar Mare simulant. A portion of the simulant will be bulk, excavation-grade that is compatible to the now depleted JSC-1a. Another portion of the simulant will be a technical grade simulant that has the proper amounts of glass and agglutinates included. Finally, a titanium-rich Mare will be produced. The correct concentrations of titanium are critical for mechanical and chemical process development and testing. • After the 3 metric tons of Mare simulant; be able to produce bulk simulant at $10,000 per ton. This will be 30% better than the NASA cost target specified in the original solicitation.• ZAP will deliver 1 metric ton of research grade Highlands type lunar simulant.• ZAP will deliver a documented process for producing low-cost, bulk mare simulants. After phase 2 project, estimated cost is: $5,000 per ton.• ZAP will test and demonstrate the applicability of the manufacturing process to produce other Celestial body materials. Examples include: Asteroid, Mars, probe reference samples, and dark glass.