One critical challenge on the Moon and Mars is the extreme variation of temperatures, which can damage the payloads and be detrimental to the human habitat. In response to this challenge, we have been focusing on developing a new material: aerogels, from the in situ resources available in Martian and Lunar soil. The combination of aerogels with lunar regolith represents one of the advantages of thermal insulation (aerogel’s property) and heat storage (regolith’s property) simultaneously. In recent years, aerogels exploiting in-situ resources have increasingly been investigated in the literature, and the process usually proposed is a sol-gel applicable to pre-processed regolith so as to separate specific elements such as SiO2. This project proposes an innovative approach using pristine regolith and a freeze-drying process exploiting the lunar and Martian conditions.
