Speaker
Description
Space agencies are pursuing sustained lunar and Martian exploration, where in-situ resource utilization (ISRU), autonomous construction, excavation, and surface mobility will play a crucial role. To design and validate such systems before deployment, there is a growing need for high-fidelity virtual twins capable of reproducing the behavior of extraterrestrial regolith and its interactions with engineering systems. Among the available numerical approaches, the Discrete Element Method (DEM) is widely regarded as a cornerstone technology for modeling granular materials and forms a key component of future virtual regolith environments. A realistic representation of extraterrestrial regolith must capture a wide range of coupled physical phenomena, including particle mechanics under reduced-gravity conditions, thermal processes, gas-regolith interactions and electrostatic charging. While significant progress has been made in modeling individual processes, the integration of these phenomena into a coherent, predictive and transferable multiphysics framework remains a major challenge. The fundamental obstacle lies in the scarcity of experimental data collected under relevant extraterrestrial conditions. Earth-based facilities can reproduce selected environmental factors such as vacuum, extreme temperatures, or radiation exposure, but they cannot provide sustained reduced-gravity environments required for comprehensive material characterization and model validation. As a result, current numerical models can often reproduce specific laboratory experiments but cannot reliably predict regolith behavior across the wide range of environments and loading scenarios expected during lunar and Martian operations. This lack of gravity-consistent model validation hinders the development of robust virtual twins that could serve as virtual testing grounds for ISRU technologies and surface systems.