Merriam Crater cinder deposits
Unreviewed draft
This page was built from a teammate-supplied list. The text is teammate-written, unreviewed. Sources pending.
Summary
not provided
Location
- Country
- USA (Arizona)
- Coordinates
- 35.34, -111.28 (approximate)
- Elevation (m)
- 1850
- Year first used as an analog
- 1993
Terrain and geology
not provided
Climate
not provided
Parameters matched
not provided
Why it is an analog
Parent material of the most widely used lunar mare simulant.
Key differences: where the analogy breaks down
Ash contains volcanic glass but is weathered and hydrated; grain shapes rounder than lunar agglutinates.
Experiments done
Basaltic ash quarried near Merriam Crater to make JSC-1 and JSC-1A lunar mare simulants used in hundreds of excavation, drilling, sintering and dust tests worldwide.
Experiments proposed
In-situ excavation and bulldozing tests on the parent deposit; sintering/3D-printing landing pads from local ash; dust-mitigation coatings; geotechnical cone-penetrometer comparisons with Apollo data.
How to adjust it
Crush and dry the ash to lunar grain-size distribution; add agglutinate-like glass by microwave sintering; test in vacuum tents.
Access
not provided
Hazards
not provided
Sources
Sources pending (no sources in CSV).
v1 score, percentile and overlap flag
A descriptive lookup of scores v1 already stored. It is not a test, and a high percentile here does not show that this is a good analog.
v1 used this site
Yes. This place matches the v1 site "sf volcanic field", about 19.6 km away.
| Score view | Result | Percentile | Score | Distance to tile (km) | Overlap flag |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Connecting Ridge C1, Base | Scored | 72.8 | 3.5 | 3.9 | Not in a flagged tile |
| Connecting Ridge C1, Landing and mobility | Scored | 77.9 | 3.3 | 3.9 | Not in a flagged tile |
| Connecting Ridge C1, Power and night | Scored | 72.8 | 2.5 | 3.9 | Not in a flagged tile |
| Shackleton rim, Base | Scored | 84.4 | 31.8 | 3.9 | Not in a flagged tile |
| Shackleton rim, Landing and mobility | Scored | 92.5 | 36.3 | 3.9 | Not in a flagged tile |
| Shackleton rim, Power and night | Scored | 84.4 | 23.1 | 3.9 | Not in a flagged tile |
Overlap flag: whether the tile used for the score is one v1 flagged as stable in its top group across the Monte Carlo runs.
What these scores can and cannot tell you
- This is a lookup of scores v1 already stored. It is descriptive and is not a test of the method.
- A site is matched to the best-scoring tile that passed the gates within the match radius. A different radius would give different numbers.
- Tiles are large compared with most sites, so a score describes the surrounding area, not the site itself.
- Scores exist only for tiles that passed the land-cover and data gates. A gated-out or unscored site has no score, which says nothing about how good an analog it is.
- Percentile is the share of scored tiles in that view with a lower score.
- The Moon score is effectively terrain only. Mars is a low-confidence secondary result.
- v1 failed its negative controls, so a high percentile here does not show that a site is a good analog.
- The ranking is not checked against independent data. Gravity, air, dust and radiation are not scored.
- Sites are compared with views of their own body only.
- Match radius: 20 km, the radius v1 used.