Abstract
The future manned lunar exploration required a base for people to stay on the moon. One of the key technologies in order to build a moon base is a burying method of the base. The authors have developed a construction robot for retaining walls to protect a moon base from radioactive rays and heat. Our robot builds the walls in less material, by stacking sandbags which wrapped regolith in fibber sheet. The authors performed centrifugal model tests in order to evaluate the stability of the wall. Three kinds of cross-sectional shapes of sandbag specimen were evaluated. An aluminium-coated polyethylene film was used for a material of the sandbag specimen. The lunar soil simulant FJS-1 and the silica sands No. 8 was used in the model. The results show a sufficient stability of the lunar sandbag wall. The design method of the wall by using the stability analysis was validated based on comparison with the experimental results.