Seismic Morphing of Regolith

Objective

Surface shaking on airless worlds reorganizes regolith, producing “cold spots” around fresh lunar craters. Remote sensing alone cannot resolve how impact-induced seismic loading drives depth-dependent dilation. This project will establish a predictive, experimentally validated link from impact-driven seismic boundary conditions to depth-resolved bulk-density change, yielding the first forward cold spot formation-mechanism law and enabling future inversion to impact energy/angle and resource targeting. SEISMOR couples continuum wave-propagation models that set depth-dependent boundary conditions with a standardized, open-source DEM workflow and a focused vacuum benchtop validation campaign. The project generates a broadly sampled synthetic catalogue across realistic material and gravity regimes, then extracts an uncertainty-aware macroscopic relation via Bayesian filtering alongside a complementary tree-based model, validated against controlled vacuum experiments. Outcomes include an open-source analysis tool implementing the pipeline, a public synthetic dataset with clear metadata, and a concise ISRU policy brief on blast loading and surface interactions. In the near term, the framework will be applied to representative case studies to quantify uncertainty and test assumptions. By providing a transparent bridge from seismic boundary conditions to density change, SEISMOR delivers a vacuum-validated, gravity-scalable basis to interpret lunar cold spots, inform early-stage surface-science and mission-concept choices, and strengthen Europe’s leadership in planetary science.