The surface of the Moon is covered by regolith, a layer of poorly sorted particles ranging in size from dust to boulders, the median particle size of which is very fine sand (Carrier et al., 1991). Because of its ubiquity, the regolith is primarily what we observe on the Moon with remote sensing instruments and is the material we interact with when exploring the lunar surface. Many of the important geological, geochemical, mineralogical, and geotechnical characteristics that define lunar regolith were established by the Apollo missions and its precursors (e.g., McKay et al., 1991). Modern remote sensing methods allow us to extrapolate regolith characteristics from landing sites to places that have not yet been explored in situ.The existing paradigm for regolith growth and evolution is that it is dominated by impact cratering and gardening (e.g., Costello et al., 2018;McKay et al., 1991;Shoemaker et al., 1967). Because of the similarity between impacts and explosions, this can be thought of as an explosive demolition process. Using the Neukum production function (NPF) for the Moon combined with scaling calculations to determine the size of impactors (Ivanov, 2001), the kinetic energy delivered by impacts over the last 3 Ga that formed 10 m ≤ D ≤ 500 m craters is ∼3-6 × 10 15 J/ km 2 , approximately equivalent to a megaton of TNT/km 2 , with ∼10 4 unique events/km 2 . This demolition process is why there is almost no bedrock exposed on the Moon's upper surface, the median grain size of the surface has been reduced to very fine sand, and regolith thickens with time.
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