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Last night we had a vergence of 4 people who helped discover lunar soil simulant BP-1, the 100s of tons of regolith at NASA's Robotic Mining Competition and @SwampWorks_KSC. The story starts with Brian Wilcox of JPL at the Desert RATS field test. (Picture courtesy Scott Howe.)1/N 
2/ In the picture you see Brian is dusty up to the hip. That's because he was walking on a gray mountain of dust, but the surface collapsed and he sunk in. He says he was lucky he didn't go in over his head and suffocate. He couldn't get free, so he called for help.
3/ People rescued him (and took the picture). Moonwalker Jack Schmitt was nearby and came to check out the weird gray hill that could support your weight but occasionally collapse so you sink in. Jack played with it and commented "wow, this stuff behaves a lot like lunar soil!"
4/ Rob Mueller of @SwampWorks_KSC heard him say it. The next week I was there. Rob told me to get a bucket of that stuff back to the Swamp Works for analysis. Most of us had flown to the field test (Arizona) but I found a NASA truck and got the driver to take the bucket of dust.
(This is Rob and me at JPL yesterday.) When we got the bucket back to the Swamp Works, I measured its particle size distribution and discovered it closely matches lunar soil. That's why it behaves like lunar soil. It behaves more like it than any of the expensive simulants.
6/ Lunar soil simulant typically costs $15,000 to $100,000 per ton. We bought this entire mountain of dust at just $9 per ton. We had it shipped in 1 ton bags on flatbed trucks across the country. Hundreds and hundreds of tons. We also bought tons for JPL and shipped it there.
7/7 So that is how lunar soil simulant BP-1 was born. By the way, BP stands for Black Point (in Arizona) where we discovered it. It was fun getting the four of us together at dinner last night to re-live the story.
