Abstract To sustain long-duration space missions while reducing risk and costs, In Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) is proposed to establish long-term presence on the Moon and to facilitate future crewed missions farther thanks to the creation of products by using locally available resources. A key lunar resource is the regolith due to its physiochemical properties, which make it suitable for human life support, propellant production, and lunar construction. The development of regolith samplers capturing samples that are representative of the bulk and avoid sample acquisition bias is a crucial step. In this context, the present study proposes the development of a system sampling lunar regolith by combining electrostatic and vibration forces. The system is tested at controlled environment humidity considering samples of Lunar Highlands Simulant-1 (LHS-1) lunar regolith simulant differing in compaction levels, various sampling process durations, and under varied humidity. This study evaluates the sampling performance in terms of collected regolith mass and power consumption. In addition, for the first time, the Particle Size Distributions of collected and original regolith samples were compared, demonstrating the representativity of the proposed sampling system.
Pirrone et al. (Thu,) studied this question.