The surfaces of many planetary bodies, including asteroids, moons, and planets, are composed of rubble-like grains held together by varying levels of gravitational attraction and cohesive forces. Future instrumentation for operation on, and interacting with, such surfaces will require efficient and effective design principles and methods of testing. Here we present results from the EMPANADA experiment (Ejecta-Minimizing Protocols for Applications Needing Anchoring or Digging on Asteroids) which flew on several reduced gravity parabolic flights. EMPANADA studies the effects of the insertion of a flexible probe into a granular medium as a function of ambient gravity. This is done for an idealized 2D system as well as a more realistic 3D sample. To quantify the dynamics inside the 2D granular material we employ photoelasticity to identify the grain-scale forces throughout the system, while in 3D experiments we use simulated regolith. Experiments were conducted at three different levels of gravity: martian, lunar, and microgravity. In this work, we demonstrate that the photoelastic technique provides results that complement traditional load cell measurements in the 2D sample, and show that the idealized system exhibits similar behaviour to the more realistic 3D sample. We note that the presence of discrete, stick-slip failure events depends on the gravitational acceleration.

Probing regolith-covered surfaces in low gravity

Granular packings exhibit significant changes in rheological and structural properties when the rotational symmetry of spherical or circular particles is broken. Here, we report on experiments exploring the differences in dynamics of a grain-scale intruder driven through a packing of either disks or pentagons, where the presence of edges and vertices on grains introduces the possibility of rotational constraints at edge-edge contacts, as well as differences in grain-scale dynamics and stress transmission through the granular material. We observe that the intruder’s stick-slip dynamics are comparable between the disk packing near the frictional jamming fraction and the pentagonal packing at significantly lower packing fractions. We connect this stark contrast in packing fraction with the average speed, rotation, and vorticity fields of grains during slip events, finding that rotation of pentagons is limited and the flow of pentagonal grains is largely confined in front of the intruder, whereas disks rotate more on average and circulate around the intruder to fill the open channel behind it. We lastly observe that the packing of pentagons does not transmit stresses as far around the system as does the packing of disks, even at comparable applied forces from the intruder, and that disks transmit back-bending stress chains more frequently and with greater spatial extent than pentagons. Measures of spatial extent of stress transmission collapse when packing fraction is rescaled with respect to the packing fraction of open channel formation, though intruder dynamics do not collapse. Our results indicate that grain-scale rotation constraints significantly modify collective motion of grains on mesoscopic scales and correspondingly enhance resistance to penetration of a local intruder.

Particle dynamics in two-dimensional point-loaded granular media composed of circular or pentagonal grains

The effect of boundary roughness on dense granular flows

**Session Chairs:**
<br>
<br>Alejandra Aguirre and Luis Pugnaloni

Q&A session 1

technical paper

[EPJ Web of Conferences, Volume 249 (2021)](https://www.epj-conferences.org/articles/epjconf/abs/2021/03/contents/contents.html)

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Powders & Grains 2021

Powders & Grains 2021 will be held in Buenos Aires (Argentina, VIRTUAL) July 5, 13, 21, 29 and Aug 6, 2021. The aim of the conference is to give an up-to-date picture of the broad research field of granular media, powders and grains. Contributions from experts around the world will focus on research topics that cover a wide range of open problems in the field.

Poster Session

poster

**Session Chairs:**
<br>
<br>Jean-Noel Roux and Nicolás Estrada

Karen E. Daniels

3

8

Presentations

Probing regolith-covered surfaces in low gravity

Particle dynamics in two-dimensional point-loaded granular media composed of circular or pentagonal grains

The effect of boundary roughness on dense granular flows

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