The surfaces of airless bodies are covered by a porous regolith, a loose ensemble of rocks and dust grains, due to a multitude of erosion and impact processes over billions of years (McKay et al., 1991). Its upper layers determine how those planetary bodies are observed as their surface morphology strongly affects optical properties (Hapke, 2008;Vernazza et al., 2012). The porous structure of stacked grains will also influence the interaction of any planet, moon, or asteroid with its environment or precipitating radiation. Especially the effect of porosity on thermal conductivity has been of recent interest (Ryan et al., 2022;Wood, 2020). The porosity of the upper regolith is also connected to the mechanical properties of the grain stacking (Kiuchi & Nakamura, 2014) as well as grain transport processes across a planetary surface (Schwan et al., 2017;Vernazza et al., 2012). While a large number of studies of lunar regolith have been performed, the porosity of the pristine upper regolith, defined as the ratio of voids to the total volume in the region near the surface that is accessible for precipitating radiation, is difficult to deduce from returned samples and requires non-invasive methods (Ohtake et al., 2010). Early investigations estimated a porosity value between 0.8 and 0.9 from reflectance measurements (Hapke & van Horn, 1963). Similarly, Ohtake et al. ( 2010) found a high porosity for the Apollo 16 sample site, which was confirmed by Hapke and Sato (2016), determining a porosity of 0.83 ± 0.03 for the upper lunar regolith at this specific site. This value for the upper regolith differs from the result of studies with returned samples of 0.52 ± 0.02 for the upper 15 cm of the lunar soil (Carrier III et al., 1991). Impacting particles, such as photons, ions, or electrons, however, have much smaller interaction regions on the order of millimeters (Hapke & Sato, 2016). It is thus questionable how applicable measurements of the porosity from returned samples are