By Artemis missions, NASA will land the first woman and first person of color on the Moon, using innovative technologies to explore more of the lunar surface than ever before. An Artemis Base Camp on the surface and the Gateway in lunar orbit will be built.

For sustainability, the IRSU strategy is focusing on exploiting Lunar soil (regolith-a complex mixture of SiO2 and other oxides) by using already terrestrial developed advanced technologies for extracting pure elements (i.e. Si, Al, Mg, Fe, Ti, etc.), to produce breathing air, growing plants, building materials, screens against radiations, etc. Under great focus is also the space junk mainly consisting of light alloys based on aluminum, silicon and titanium that act as structural materials of satellites, space shuttles that are now in disuse orbit around the earth.

If properly designed, composite materials meet most of the requirements. Resulting from the ad-hoc combination of dissimilar materials, to obtain certain performances, for fabricating succesfully suitable composites materials, it is sufficient to select the two phases and adopt a simple process that in the context “far from ground”, is feasible under low gravity and limited resources. The simplicity of the process (liquid assisted processes such as sintering and infiltration, as well as 3D-printing, etc.) is mainly determined by the degree of “affinity” when the two dissimilar materials are in contact and the resulting interfaces.

In this paper, a few examples of interfaces/combinations under study for developing new materials for space with increased capabilities, will be provided. In particolar, the prelimary results obtained by wetting experiments performed in the liquid Al7075/SiO2 system both by sessile and dispensed drop methods, under well defined operating conditions, in terms of spreading kinetics, contact angle values and interaction phenomena observed at the interface, will be shown and discussed.

Figure 1. SEM image and map analysis at the cross-sectioned Al7075/SiO2 sample after wetting experiment performed by sessile drop method at T = 1150°C and under a vacuum of Ptot = 10-4 Pa.