Landing Pad Construction Rover Attachment Development

This paper will discuss development of a tool that can be used as an attachment to existing rovers to gather local materials and build a landingpad. The landing pad must be able to withstand thruster heat, forces from the lander and prevent regolith from sandblasting everything in the surrounding area during landing. This paper focusses on Mars and the Moon as locations for this technology. Environmental conditions affecting the design is taken into account as well as the applicability of a variety of soil stabilization techniques. The evaluation process lead to the choice of using local gravel to build several zones with varying particle sizes in an analog application of a breakwater to prevent the exhaust gases from eroding the fine regolith dust while minimizing the amount of mass required to bring from Earth. Laboratory tests were run with a small rocket nozzle and compressed air to test the effectiveness of the layers of rocks and the size variation that was most effective. Once the effective size was determined, a tool was designed that would excavate the local regolith and sort out the rocks and sort them in different size fractions which then could be deposited in the optimal sequence to prevent regolith erosion and subsequent sandblasting of the surrounding area and assets. The prototype tool was then tested and proven to be able to sort the rocks of the required sizes.