3 ms·
The're a surprisingly high flux of micrometeoroid impacts at the lunar surface. Most of these are too small to do much damage, but there will probably be measur
by jjk166 2y ago
The're a surprisingly high flux of micrometeoroid impacts at the lunar surface. Most of these are too small to do much damage, but there will probably be measurable erosion in centuries and genuine damage within about 1 million years. The timeline for it to be destroyed/completely broken down is much longer.
For context, there's roughly a 50% chance of an astronaut being hit by a micrometeoroid large enough to kill them every 1.3 million years of time spent on the moon's surface. There's roughly a 50% chance of a square meter of the moon being hit by a micrometeoroid equavalent to 3 kg on TNT in a billion years.
- consumer451 2y agoThank you for seeing through my sloppy writing, and identifying what I was getting at. I should have have said "aside from human intervention." So, aside from the human intervention, and assuming that the materials can generally withstand radiation... let's say it's 6 sq meters, [0] I know this is not exactly how it works, but if LLMs[1] and my own lacking skills at mathematics are accurate, then ~70 million years? That sounds so much more "permanent" than anything on Earth. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intuitive_Machines_Nova-C https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intuitive_Machines_Nova-C [1] https://chatgpt.com/share/67c51a06-51e8-8012-9f21-c9a428551d33 https://chatgpt.com/share/67c51a06-51e8-8012-9f21-c9a428551d... (it would be amazing if someone could verify this math and logic, I cannot)
- pixl97 2y agoWater in concert with temperature flux is really destructive causing a massive amount of erosion here on Earth. With that said thermal cycles on the moon are very large, with a range up to 450F. That much thermal expansion and contraction over time is going to be hard on anything not shielded under some soil.
- consumer451 2y agoI wonder what a structure of metal(aluminum?) would look like after hundreds of thousands of 14-day 450F cycles. How many cycles would it take to turn into a mound? Would a coherent mound still count as "existing?"
- pixl97 2y agoAluminum might be one of the worst metals to use in an application like this. https://velo.outsideonline.com/road/road-racing/technical-faq-aluminum-frame-crankarm-fatigue/ https://velo.outsideonline.com/road/road-racing/technical-fa... >Aluminum does not have a distinct fatigue or endurance limit, so its S-N graph curves down from the upper left to the right and continues to curve down lower and lower toward the lower right corner of the graph. This illustrates that it will eventually fail even from low stress applications, given enough of them. Steel/titanium, if its fatigue tolerance is in the temperature range, would last much longer if not near indefinably until it came to impacts.