PARKS’ BIOGRAPHY

Parks Easter has a Bachelors of Science in Civil Engineering with a focus on Geotechnical and Water Resources Engineering from the University of Central Florida. For the past 4 years, he has conducted research on the geotechnical characteristics of Lunar, Martian, and Asteroid regolith simulants at the Florida Space Institute’s Exolith Lab. His expertise includes soil characterization, geotechnical engineering, hydrology, project management, curriculum development, K-12 outreach, and proposal writing.
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Parks’ research includes the development of custom simulants for collaborators such as NASA Swampworks, Cislune, and Space Resource Technologies, which have been widely adopted by researchers worldwide for hardware testing and experimental procedures in simulated regolith environments. His published work encompasses properties such as particle size distribution, bulk density, grain density, particle shape, shear strength, and angle of repose. He also developed and characterized a new lunar regolith simulant, LHS-2E, tailored for the Florida Space Institute’s Lunar Highlands Regolith Bin, enhancing its representation of lunar surface particle size distribution for hardware testing.