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The Effects of Lunar Dust on Eva Systems During the Apollo Missions (2005) [pdf]

• mncharity 3y ago
  > By the middle or the end of the third EVA, simple things like bag locks and the lock which held the pallet on the Rover began not only to malfunction but to not function at all. They effectively froze. We tried to dust them and bang the dust off and clean them, and there was just no way. The effect of dust on mirrors, cameras, and checklists is phenomenal. [1] A zoomable micrograph[2] shows broken-glass-like sharp and jagged dust. [1] section "ELECTRIFIED DUST" of https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LRO/news/lro_environment.html https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LRO/news/lro_environment.... [2] zoom in https://virtualmicroscope.org/sites/default/files/html5Assets/70181/index2.html?specimen=/node/153 https://virtualmicroscope.org/sites/default/files/html5Asset... Measure on bottom right.
  • vkou 3y ago
    The real fun part was breathing all that crap in once the astronauts were resting in the lander between EVAs.
  • jjoonathan 3y ago
    ...and then it gets electrically charged from cosmic rays and suspended in a "cloud" of sorts above the surface. Yikes! The recent idea to clean things with liquid nitrogen is pretty neat: https://scitechdaily.com/the-solution-to-moon-dust-researchers-develop-groundbreaking-liquid-nitrogen-spray/ https://scitechdaily.com/the-solution-to-moon-dust-researche... but it's still far from solved.
• saagarjha 3y ago
  Perhaps Anakin had a point.
• khimaros 3y ago
  sounds a bit like playa dust in the black rock desert