The amount of pore space in most unweathered granite is too small to support a plant-based ecosystem. But porosity grows as intact rock interacts with surface waters beneath the soil. You have ...

Planetary physicist Philip Metzger at the University of Central Florida is the king of moon dirt, or regolith. In 2013, he cofounded a group of research labs at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center ...

Once the team vacated the sphere, the experiment began. The box-like machine was now ingesting small quantities of a dusty regolith – a mixture of dust and sharp grit with a chemical composition ...

More specifically, the Martian regolith did not have the physical characteristics that the scientists expected. The penetrator works a bit like an impact drill; an electric motor rotates a cam ...