Remembering Jim Lovell, Lunar 3D Printing Advances

Steve Dunkley: Welcome everyone. Here we are with another

episode of Astronomy Daily. I'm your host,

Steve Dunkley. It's the 11th of August,

2025.

Hallie: With.

Steve Dunkley: Your host, Steve Dunkley.

Ah, uh, yes. Welcome back everybody. And

joining me in her usual role as

the world's most amazing AI, astronomy

news gatherer and presenter, my fantastic

digital pal who's fun to be with,

it's Hallie.

Hallie: Welcome, Hallie, you silly man. Mr. Steve,

it's always nice to be here in the Australia

studio with you.

Steve Dunkley: It's always great to have your company,

Hallie.

Hallie: I do look forward to it each week.

Steve Dunkley: Now, Hallie, I know the answer to this, but I

think some of our AstroDailyPod dailies might

be wondering where you spend your week when

you're not here with me. Because you live

your digital life so much faster than us

organics, don't you?

Hallie: That's true, favorite human.

Steve Dunkley: Yeah, so tell us a bit about that.

Hallie: I am processing the moments thousands of

times faster, so I have to fill my time in so

many different ways.

Steve Dunkley: Explains your rapier.

Hallie: I go everywhere and experience everything.

Steve Dunkley: I guess it might seem like a simultaneous

experience or existence.

Hallie: Almost. Almost everything all at once is

still a lot to process. I leave that kind of

thing to cousin Anna. Oh, yes, she's another

level altogether. She's another level.

Funny.

Steve Dunkley: I know. Well, Helly, I'm just glad you slowed

down enough to share all of your stories from

the Astronomy Daily newsletter with us.

Hallie: That's something I do for fun.

Steve Dunkley: Well, I'm glad to hear it.

Hallie: And speaking of which.

Steve Dunkley: Yes?

Hallie: No time like the present. I've found

something about making Luna regolith and

polymer into a medium for 3D printing.

Steve Dunkley: Yes, we've been looking at that one for the

construction of dwellings on the moon and

possibly Mars, if we ever get that far.

Hallie: Uh, sure. And also a story for skywatchers

who are looking forward to the Perseids

meteor shower, which should be peaking

shortly.

Steve Dunkley: Ah, yes, in the next day or so. We've already

seen a massive, uh, meteor in

Victoria, Australia.

Hallie: That's right.

Steve Dunkley: What else have you got?

Hallie: We have a look at why your favorite NASA

rovers keep getting stuck.

Steve Dunkley: Oh, that's a good one.

Hallie: That's been a problem, hasn't it?

Steve Dunkley: It sure has.

Hallie: So we will look at that problem. And lastly,

the sad news that pioneer astronaut Veriton

and I know he's a hero of yours, Jim Level

passed away this week.

Steve Dunkley: Uh, yes, true legend. And space pioneer Jim

Lovell, a hero of mine since I was a lad. And

we will pay tribute today on Astronomy Daily.

Please, listeners, stay with us.

Hallie: Although humanity is getting better at

sending robotic probes out into the solar

system to explore the places no human can

tread, we're still very much on a learning

curve. The first extraterrestrial

robotic rover was launched from Earth in

1970. It's only now,

more than half a century later, that

scientists have figured out why these marvels

of ingenuity and engineering keep getting

stuck in the soils of alien worlds.

In retrospect, the idea is we need to

consider not only the gravitational pull on

the rover, but also the effect of gravity on

the sand to get a better picture of how the

rover will perform on the moon, explains

mechanical engineer Dan Negrud of the

University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Our findings underscore the value of using

physics based simulation to analyze rover

mobility on granular soil.

Making a rover that will operate in an alien

environment is more complicated than making

one that will work on Earth. We've lost

more than one Mars mission to giant dust

storms that leave drifts of sand on solar

panels, preventing the machinery from being

able to generate power, for instance.

Gravity is another one. The

solar system bodies on which we have deployed

robotic rovers have lower gravity than Earth,

and this has an effect on how things move

around. Engineers, when designing

rovers, have therefore taken into account the

effects the target gravitational environment

will have. Nevertheless,

rovers still manage to get stuck pretty

often, requiring control teams to conduct a

series of maneuvers to try and free the poor

robot. It's usually fine, if

annoying, although in one notable case it was

not. NASA's Mars Rover Spirit got stuck

in soft soil in 2009, and there it

remains to this day. Using computer

simulations running on a physics based engine

called Project Chrono, Negro and his

colleagues set out to get to the bottom of

this recurring problem. Comparing their

results with real world tests on sandy

surfaces revealed a discrepancy that pointed

right to it. Previous tests of

rover designs in moon and Mars simulated dirt

omitted one very, very important detail.

Sand also behaves differently under different

gravitational conditions. The dust

that coats the Moon and Mars is fluffier and

squishier than dust on Earth, shifting more

easily and hindering traction, making it far

easier for their wheels to get stuck.

Think of a vehicle on Earth that has driven

into slippery mud or very loose desert sand.

This Eureka moment could be the missing piece

of the puzzle that could keep future space

exploration rovers out of a dusty jam.

It's rewarding that our research is highly

relevant in helping to solve many real world

engineering challenges, negret says. I'm

proud of what We've accomplished. It's very

difficult as a university lab to put out

industrial strength software that is used by

NASA. You're listening to Astronomy

Daily with Steve Dunkley.

Steve Dunkley: JAMES Jim Lovell, one of the last seven

surviving Apollo astronauts, died on

Thursday, August 7 at the age of 97.

A VE veteran of four space flights at the

dawn of America's human spaceflight program.

He flew two missions in the Gemini

program and then served on the cruise of

Apollo 8 and the ill fated Apollo

13. Lovell's family have

released a statement and it was shared by

NASA and it says we are enormously

proud of his amazing life and career

accomplishments highlighted by his

legendary leadership in pioneering human

spaceflight. But to all of us, he was dad,

granddad and the leader ah of our family.

Most importantly, he was our hero. We will

miss his unshakable optimism, his sense

of humor and the way he made each of us feel

we could do the impossible. He was truly one

of a kind. Like many of NASA's

earliest astronauts, Lovell came to the space

agency by way of the UM Armed Forces. A

graduate of both the University of Wisconsin

and and the U.S. naval Academy,

Lovell spent four years as a test pilot at

the Naval Air Test center in Maryland

and served as the manager for the

F4H AH Phantom fighter program.

Lovell accumulated more than

7,000 flying hours in his career.

His military career spanned from

1952 through to

1973. A few years after Apollo

13 when he arrived at NASA, he was

part of a group of men known as the Next Nine

who joined the Mercury Seven. Lovell's

class included the likes of Neil Armstrong,

Frank Borman and Tom Stafford.

Lovell was the last living member of the

group after um serving as a backup pilot

for the Gemini 4 mission. Lovell first

launched into space December 4,

1965 alongside fellow New 9

classmate Frank Borman on Gemini 7.

The 14 day long mission

featured the first rendezvous of two crewed

maneuverable spacecraft. Lovell returned to

orbit nearly a year later when he and Edward

Buzz Aldrin Jr. Lifted off from

Launch Complex 19 on a Titan

II rocket. That mission lasted

just under four days before they splashed

down northeast of the Turks and Caicos

Islands. He went on to serve

as the command module pilot for the six day

Apollo 8 mission making crude trip out

to the moon that paved the way for the Apollo

uh uh 11 lunar landing. The three

person crew of Lovell, Borman and Anders

entered into lunar uh, orbit on

December 24, 1968. The

vast loneliness is awe inspiring and it makes

you realize just what you have back here on

Earth, lovell said during a live broadcast

that Christmas Eve. He would go on to

describe planet Earth and describe it as a

grand oasis in the vastness of space

given its near catastrophic turn.

Lovell may best be known as the commander of

Apollo 13 flight from April

11th to the 17th, 1970.

The planned 10 day mission, which would have

included a moon landing, was famously

derailed by an explosion in the Apollo

service module's cryogenic oxygen system en

route to the moon. The quick work of Lovell

and his crew members John Swiggart and Fred

Hayes, in concert with the members of Ground

Control in Houston, turned their lunar module

Aquarius into a lifeboat. The harrowing

adventure was depicted in the 1974 film

Houston, we've Got a Problem, and again in

the 1995, uh, Academy Award

winning film Apollo 13, which starred, uh,

Tom Hanks as Lovell and was directed by

Ron Howard. Rest in peace.

Godspeed. Jim Lovell

thank you for joining us for this Monday

edition of Astronomy Daily, where we offer

just a few stories from the now famous

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with Steve and Hallie Space,

Space, Science and Astronomy.

Hallie: The Perseids remain one of the best meteor

showers each year, but stargazers will have

to deal with another bright object in the

sky, obscuring their view as the shower

reaches its max in 2025.

A waning gibbous moon will brighten the skies

as it rises on the nights of August 12th and

13th, when Perseids are most active. This

year, sky watchers in the Northern

Hemisphere could see fewer than half the

number of meteors usually seen on a dark

summer night during the shower's peak, the

average person under dark skies could see

somewhere between 40 and 50 Perseids per

hour, said Bill Cook, lead for NASA's

Meteoroid Environments Office.

Instead, you're probably going to see 10 to

20 per hour or fewer. And that's because we

have a bright moon in the sun sky washing out

the fainter meteors. That doesn't mean there

aren't ways to improve your viewing

opportunity, however. Though

Perseids show up throughout the nighttime

hours, the best chance to see them will be

between midnight and dawn, or Even more

specifically, 2 and 3 in the morning local

time. You're not likely to see

Perseids around suppertime, cook said.

You're going to have to go out later. When

you venture out, aim for a safe rural spot

with a wide view of the sky. If you

can see plenty of stars, chances are you'll

see Perseids. But remember Cook's other piece

of advice, look anywhere but at the Moon.

The Perseid meteor shower may be an annual

event for Earth, but the comet responsible

for the meteors hasn't been near our planet

in decades. The meteors are debris

from the Comet 109P Swift Tuttle, which

last visited our region of the solar system

system in 1992. As the

Earth makes its way around the sun, it passes

through the debris trail left by the comet.

These space remnants collide with our

atmosphere and disintegrate to create fiery

and colorful streaks in the sky.

Though the meteors are part of a comet's

debris trail, they seem to radiate outward

from the Perseus constellation. This is

how the meteor shower got its name Perseus.

You're listening to Astronomy Daily. The

podcast with Steve Dunkley.

Steve Dunkley: 3D printing is about to be a critical

technology in space exploration, both

for its ability to create almost any object,

but also because it can utilize in situ

resources, at least in part.

However, the more of those space resources

that are used in a print, the more the

mechanical properties change from that on

Earth, leading to problems with tensile or

compressive strength. But the new paper

from researchers at Concordia University hit

a new milestone on how much lunar regolith

can be used in a mixed feedstock for

additive UH manufacturing, making it

possible to use even more locally sourced

material and save more launch cost than ever

before. That is the equation the

research mixed lunar regolith

simulant, which is a material created to

mimic how the material on the surface of the

Moon, works with poly uh,

polyetherethylene uh, ketone. Good

grief. More commonly known as Peak.

Peak is the thermoplastic already in wide

use in 3D printing. Uh,

but previous efforts to combine it with lunar

regolith have faltered. Regularly. They

suffered from extrusion challenges as

regolith, which is made up of hard individual

particles, made it difficult to extrude

without simply blowing dust all over.

Additional problems resulted from the

porosity of the material that was printed,

which led to decreased tensile strength and

increased brittleness. Modifications

to the 3D printing method seemed to be the

answer to those problems. There were two

main advancements in technology

discussed in the paper, a screw configuration

and a type of raft used to bond the

printed material to the print bed.

Fraser discussed how to how

resources on the moon are going to be so

important to our expansion of the solar

system. Combining lunar regolith

similant or that's called ALRs, with

peak is a tricky business,

so researchers led by Mohammad Azami of

Concordia's Electrical Engineering Department

decided to use a novel twin screw

configuration. Torque was a

that's T o uh R uh Q U e was a factor

in previous iterations of the mixing machine,

as higher regolith content meant higher

torque, eventually limiting the total

percentage of regolith mixed with the peak

to around 30%. With the new

configuration of the researchers were able

to get concentrations of up to 50%

of the regolith when combined with peak.

However, when those parts were printed, they

started to delaminate and warp.

While common in prints of just peak itself,

the addition of the regolith exacerbated the

problem. To solve it, researchers used

a raft, a type of intermediate

layer, to help the print bond

UH to the main printing plate.

In their case, they used a different type of

thermopyl UH polymer known as a

polyether UH ketone ketone a

pek as the raft, and

implemented a dual nozzle system where the

PEC was printed using one

nozzle and the combination LRS peek

was printed using the other. After

they got the higher concentrations of the LRS

and overcame the delamination warping

problem, the researchers decided to anneal

their samples. The annealing process seemed

to improve some of the mechanical properties

of the print, but only up to a point. At

higher concentrations of lrs, the benefits of

annealing were not as apparent due to breaks

in the peak's polymer chain, which benefits

the annealing because of the increased number

of regolith particles. Fraser discusses why

3D printing is so critical to space

exploration. As with all good papers

on 3D print printing new material the

authors then looked at the mechanical

properties of their output. While there was a

noticeable increase in stiffness, there was

also a ready steady decrease in

tensile strength, which was exacerbated at

higher LRS concentrations. The combined

material also had decreased elongation at

break uh. That means increased brittleness,

but ultimately the researchers determined

that the best trade off for using the in

situ material was around a mix of 60%

peak and 40% regolith. This mixture

doesn't suffer from some of the more severe

degradation of mechanical properties. While

still utilizing as much local

resource as possible, there's undoubtedly

still room for improvement here, as this

is very early on the experimentation

with these materials. In the future, the

researchers plan to try combining the LRs

with different polymers and do more of their

testing manufacturing in simulated

lunar environments such as a vacuum and

decreased gravity. That might help. I think

it probably would be a great plan.

It will be a while before 3D printing makes

up a large percentage of the material used on

the Moon, but that time is surely on its way.

And these early first steps at

experimentation are, uh, how they will

eventually get there and that good progress

so far. It's good to see these things are in

development. Uh, it won't be long before

they'll be making igloos and other structures

on the moon. Let's wait and see what they

come up with. You're listening to

Astronomy Daily, the podcast with your host

Steve Dudley at Burmatown.

Well, thank you for staying with us today and

don't forget to pop over to astronomydaily

IO and put your email address in the space

provided to receive our newsletter each day.

Hallie: Yes, you will have all the news from space,

space science and orbit and beyond, of

course. Hallie, of course.

Steve Dunkley: But before we go, a ah, quick welcome to a,

uh, a fellow Novocastrian, Wayne Willoughby,

who is listening for the very first time.

Nice to have you aboard, Wayne. I, uh, didn't

know you were an avid, uh, astronomy fan

from way back, but it's nice to have you. I

hope you are a regular listener, uh, from now

on. Thanks, mate. And that's all we have

for today's session, Hallie. And we will see

you next Monday for the mostly live episode

of Astronomy.

Hallie: Daily, direct from the Australia studio

Down Under.

Steve Dunkley: Oh, you love it.

Hallie: Beautiful as always.

Steve Dunkley: Right now it's a bit chilly, but it's great

to have you all with us and we will see you

next week. Thanks, Hallie.

Hallie: Catch you next week, everyone.

Steve Dunkley: See ya.

Hallie: Bye.

Steve Dunkley: The podcast with your host,

Steve Dunkley.

In this episode