Space Station Live: Learning About the Soil of Space

NASA Commentator Pat Ryan talks with Dr. Marc Fries, a planetary scientist at the Johnson Space Center in Houston and principal investigator of an experiment designed to learn how soils on airless bodies behave. Specialists planning future missions to asteroids or to Mars need to know how regolith behaves and moves in microgravity, whether or not it will be difficult to anchor a spacecraft there, and how it interacts with spacecraft and spacesuit materials. Fries and his team sent canisters of material that simulate regolith to the International Space Station to study how the materials react to the weightless environment and the vibrations on board the station.
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