ABSTRACT

For decades, aerospace engineering has been advancing significantly, and it has become more of a priority to expand past Earth to the space environment. While, with the advancements of NASA’s Artemis program, Earth has advanced further and further into eventually colonizing both the surface of its moon and the surface of Mars, what has not been fully concluded is the potential hindrance that the moon’s regolith can cause to construction, power consumption, and, ultimately, colonization. Testing an accurate simulation as to what the impacts of lunar regolith can truly bring to lunar monitoring satellites, rovers, and commonly used equipment in the lunar environment will provide insight to the future of lunar travel, and what methods of mitigation can be utilized to minimize the effects of lunar regolith in the long term of lunar exploration. 
As the moon’s lunar regolith contains properties that allow it to propagate in its own magnetic field, this project analyzes the magnetic field strength and physical properties of a lunar regolith simulant and its impacts on the degradation of satellite technologies, communications devices, and different lunar rover subsystems. This project utilizes Arduino C++ programming, and operates with a set of capacitors that sense the ambient magnetic field strength of a given volume. The project itself will additionally utilize C++ programming to measure the rate of transmission of four distinct wavelengths, and aims conclude if the status quo of different technologies of today will withstand their abilities in the lunar environment over a longer period of time.