ICON’s Project “Duneflow” Completes Successful Space Flight with Blue Origin

We are pleased to announce that ICON's Project Olympus team launched our first space-bound payload on Blue Origin's New Shepard Flight earlier this month.

Project "Duneflow" is a scientific apparatus developed by ICON in partnership with NASA Marshall Space Flight Center's MMPACT project, Game Changing Development (GCD) and NASA Flight Opportunities Program.

MSFC MMPACT Team Partners, ICON and Colorado School of Mines (CSM) collaborated between Center, Industry, and Academia for this project.

The project addresses the flowability of lunar regolith and stability of artificial slopes constructed in lunar surface material. It will guide the development of more accurate geotechnical (aka mechanical) simulants that mimic lunar regolith on Earth, specifically for Excavation & Construction testing.

The hardware has been developed to test the geotechnical properties of multiple regolith simulants using existing optical video capture and post-analysis of particles in motion through orifices and during traversal down inclined planes.

The resulting dataset will be published for use in the scientific community and leveraged to enhance the design of mechanical simulants, which will aid in robotic testing and regolith conveyance needs of upcoming excavation, construction, and ISRU missions.