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I did an internship at NASA where I worked on mitigating moon dust. Something that the article doesn't mention is that, without an atmosphere, solar rays electr
by harimau777 4y ago
I did an internship at NASA where I worked on mitigating moon dust. Something that the article doesn't mention is that, without an atmosphere, solar rays electrically charge the dust causing it to stick to everything. I remember reading a series of after action reports from each of the lunar landings discussing how they dealt with the dust. Eventually they started just opening the door after the left the moon so that the dust got sucked out into the vacuum.
It was explained to me that if humanity ever tried to build a long term station on the moon, dealing with dust would be one of the biggest challenges.
- dreen 4y agoWhat other solutions were discussed? Are there any crazy ones? My favourite idea is to somehow apply massive amounts of heat to the lunar surface basically melting the given area. Since there is no wind you won't get new dust there.
- wolfram74 4y agoNot wind as we deal with on earth, but that same process that electrically charges the dust also moves it enough that there's a large cloud of sodium atoms in it it's shadow[0]. That and other elements do travel a bit around the surface. Unsure what kind of fluxes we'd have to deal with, but keeping an area dust free would involve some constant effort. [0]https://carlschmidt.science/Moon/Moon.html https://carlschmidt.science/Moon/Moon.html
- CoastalCoder 4y agoChairface Chippendale was just ahead of his time!
- JKCalhoun 4y agoProbably simpler to spray some kind of adhesive.
- sbierwagen 4y agoYou’re mass-constrained on the Moon. A big parabolic mirror could (slowly) fuse an unlimited amount of regolith.
- Retric 4y agoNew dust is constantly showing up, so it’s still a finite area. https://sservi.nasa.gov/articles/leaping-lunar-dust/ https://sservi.nasa.gov/articles/leaping-lunar-dust/
- imglorp 4y agoThere are several projects to electrostatically repel charged dust from surfaces. My search foo is failing but one of the space youtubers got a live demo in a lab where some dust was applied to a treated material and then a current was applied: the dust flew off instantly.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- EdwardDiego 4y agoIIRC, it's horribly abrasive too, yeah? I'm assuming that that electrical charge you mentioned could be used to capture it with an opposite charged filter?