Where the Earth has soil, other rocky bodies in the solar system have regolith.

ECONOMIST: Spaceflight

Analysis of lunar regolith brought back by Apollo missions shows it contains lots of oxygen.

ECONOMIST: Spaceflight

The printers, operated by robots, would use soil from the Moon, known as regolith, to build the layered cover.

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Regolith is a fine powder formed by a constant rain of small meteorites that breaks up the rocks at the surface.

ECONOMIST: Spaceflight

The discovery is more like damp rock: a mixture of 1% ice and 99% regolith, spread over thousands of square kilometres at the poles.

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Some have even suggested the loose rock regolith on the surface of the moon or Mars as a growing medium, although additional minerals would need to be brought from Earth.

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There might be even more: the measurements probe only the top half-metre of regolith, but it is thought that cometary bombardment could have left ice in the top two metres.

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In 2010 a team of researchers from Washington State University found that artificial regolith containing silicon, aluminium, calcium, iron and magnesium oxide could be used by 3D printers to create solid objects.

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The prize will go to the first person to come up with a way of quickly extracting an adequate amount of oxygen from simulated lunar regolith (volcanic ash is being used as a stand-in).

ECONOMIST: Spaceflight

As he puts it, a cubic metre of regolith contains, besides the necessary oxygen, enough hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, potassium and other trace elements to make two cheese sandwiches on rye, two colas and two large plums.

ECONOMIST: Spaceflight