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Characterization Of Fillite As A Planetary Soil Simulant In Support Of Rover Mobility Assessment In High-Sinkage/High-Slip Environments, Michael Edwards
Characterization Of Fillite As A Planetary Soil Simulant In Support Of Rover Mobility Assessment In High-Sinkage/High-Slip Environments, Michael Edwards
Graduate College Dissertations and Theses
This thesis presents the results of a research program characterizing a soil simulant called Fillite, which is composed of alumino-silicate hollow microspheres harvested from the pulverized fuel ash of coal-fired power plants. Fillite is available in large quantities at a reasonable cost and it is chemically inert. Fillite has been selected by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Glenn Research Center to simulate high-sinkage/high-slip environment in a large test bed such as the ones encountered by the Spirit rover on Mars in 2009 when it became entrapped in a pocket of soft, loose regolith on Mars. The terms high-sinkage …