Meet the Team: SILOE
SILOE is a team of 5 students from ISAE SUPAERO (Toulouse, France). The team aims to study the properties of the material found on the surface of planets and asteroids. The results of their experiment, which will be executed in the last quarter of 2024 at the Drop Towers facility, could help reduce the risks of space missions involving for instance landing and roving on the Moon and collecting surface samples.
The SILOE team is composed of five PhD and master’s students from ISAE SUPAERO (Toulouse, France): Alexia Duchêne, Jeanne Bigot, Michał Stankiewicz, Sarah Dghais, and Colas Robin. The team is interested in the mechanical properties of planetary surfaces, and how these properties influence the surface behaviour.
SILOE stands for ‘Surface Investigation in LOw gravity Environment’ and aims to improve our understanding of cohesive forces of planetary surfaces in a reduced gravity environment.
The results will help to better predict the regolith behaviour during space missions involving sampling, landing, or roving components interacting with the surface.
The team will perform sinkage experiments into diverse granular materials (e.g. glass beads, sands, lunar regolith simulant) in December 2024 in the GraviTower Bremen Pro at ZARM drop towers facility (Bremen, Germany).
The experiment will be conducted in a vacuum chamber to accurately reproduce the environment of airless planetary bodies, such as asteroids or the Moon. Every trial will involve releasing a spherical projectile of 25 mm into the granular surface. The vertical displacement of the projectile will be measured with a laser profilometer and a camera to obtain the projectile sinkage and estimate the bearing capacity (maximum load a surface can withstand before experiencing rupture) of the surface for each combination of gravity and cohesion.