No abstract available

[en] NASA's long-term vision for space exploration includes developing human habitats and conducting scientific investigations on planetary bodies, especially on Moon and Mars. To reduce the level of upmass, processing and utilization of planetary in situ resources is recognized as an important element of this vision. Within this scope and context, we have undertaken a general effort aimed primarily at extracting and refining metals, developing glass, glass-ceramic or traditional ceramic type materials using lunar soil simulants. In this paper we will present the preliminary results on our effort on carbothermal reduction of oxides for elemental extraction and zone refining for obtaining high-purity metals. In addition, we will demonstrate the possibility of developing glasses from lunar soil simulant for fixing the nuclear waste from potential nuclear power generators on planetary bodies. Compositional analysis, X-ray diffraction patterns and differential thermal analysis (DTA) of processed samples are presented

[en] High resolution real-time X-ray Transmission Microscopy, XTM, has been applied to obtain information fundamental to solidification of optically opaque metallic systems. We have previously reported the measurement of the solute profile in the liquid, phase growth, and detailed solid-liquid interfacial morphology of aluminum based alloys with exposure times less than 2 seconds. Recent advances in XTM furnace design have provided an increase in real-time magnification (during solidification) for the XTM from 40X to 160X. The increased magnification has enabled for the first time the XTM imaging of real-time growth of fibers and particles with diameters of 5 μm. We have previously applied this system to study the kinetics of formation and morphological evolution of secondary fibers and particles in Al-Bi monotectic alloys. In this paper we present the preliminary results of the first real-time observations of fiber morphology evolution in optically opaque bulk metal sample of Aluminum-Gold eutectic alloy. These studies show that the XTM can be applied to study the fundamentals of eutectic and monotectic solidification. We are currently attempting to apply this technology in the fundamentals of solidification in microgravity