Lunar environmental forcing of regolith evolution toward future extraterrestrial materials

Lunar regolith represents the cumulative product of planetary surface evolution and a direct material record of long-term lunar exposure. Understanding how the lunar environment reshapes regolith structure is therefore fundamental to linking planetary science, materials evolution, and extraterrestrial engineering. However, existing studies often isolate individual environmental processes, obscuring how coupled forcing progressively alters regolith structure and physicochemical behavior. This review traces the origin of the lunar surface environment through planetary history and examines how vacuum, thermal cycling, irradiation, micrometeoroid bombardment, dust abrasion, and low gravity regulate regolith across scales. Particular attention is given to structural overprinting, inheritance, and path-dependent evolution under coupled exposure, together with resulting changes in thermal, mechanical, optical, chemical, and particulate behavior. Building on these relationships, a mechanistic framework links environmental forcing with structural evolution, property changes, transferable mechanisms, and material-design principles. The central contribution lies in reframing lunar regolith as a dynamic environmental record whose evolving structural states encode both past exposure and susceptibility to subsequent forcing. This perspective provides a physical basis for evaluating environmental compatibility, durability, and adaptive response under lunar conditions, while offering broader principles for environment-conditioned materials science on airless planetary surfaces.