Turkish Lunar Regolith Simulant TBG-1

Being terrestrial for so many thousands of years, humanity is now advancing in the direction of being extraterrestrial. Attempts made until now were quite promising, like walking on the Moon, living in stations for very long durations miles away from Earth, sending probes to unimaginable distances in space and bringing them back to Earth, etc. In the coming decades, it is easily predictable that man will spend time on Moon in lunar shelters for periods which cannot be qualified as “short visits.” This will be followed by going to Mars and other space bodies. Such achievements will be realized thanks to space research conducted in space agencies all around world, especially by countries who can afford huge amounts of money in this field. In fact, space research is a multi-dimensional, multi-disciplinary field where important contributions can be made without having much financial support. Such an approach, evidently, will increase international cooperation in the field, and will help increasing technological and scientific levels of all countries who join this research subject. Designing shelters specially adopted to lunar environmental conditions and finding ways of construction techniques for building them is but a field where many researchers from many countries can attack. A related field is producing lunar soil simulants on Earth and making experiments on them for using lunar soil as the only in situ resource available in construction and for extracting other compounds and elements that will be needed for human survival on Moon. It is to be noted that up to date 9 countries have produced lunar soil simulants and this number is increasing continuously. The last contribution is from Turkey, with the lunar soil simulant labeled TBG-1 about which general information and properties are given in this study.