Expandable Protection Unit for Extraterrestrial Explorers

This paper presents the concept and prototyping of lunar regolith sandbags to protect extrater restrial rovers from radiation, temperature fluctuations, and micrometeorite impacts. Lunar regolith is suspected to shield against the challenging conditions commonly experienced on the Moon’s surface. When filtered into a sandbag-like structure, regolith can be arranged into a modular protective jacket-like structure to fit any rover. The structure increases the overall mass of the rover, resulting in improved traction and stability, and can be oriented or altered for an optimal center of mass. This technology minimizes launch mass and volume by using an expandable product filled with in-situ resources.