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Along with the dust. That stuff is apparently nasty. It's glass shards melted around iron blasted by UV rays. So it has ridiculous static cling and the consiste
by brownbat 13y ago
Along with the dust. That stuff is apparently nasty. It's glass shards melted around iron blasted by UV rays. So it has ridiculous static cling and the consistency of sandpaper. It levitates up to a kilometer above the surface because of these properties. Dust got in everything, and was an eye and lung irritant on the entire trip back for Apollo missions that included a moonwalk. (If too much gets in the lungs, an astronaut can face iron toxicity.)
NASA research presentation, lists many of the problems:
http://isru.msfc.nasa.gov/lib/Documents/BenefWksp2010/presentations/Street_Living_on_a_Dusty_Moon.pdf http://isru.msfc.nasa.gov/lib/Documents/BenefWksp2010/presen...
NASA labs are working on dust mitigation, it's probably not an insolvable problem. And some NASA engineers claim you might be able to do cool things with it, like melt it glass roads without additional construction materials. But mitigating all the nasty is still a damn hard engineering problem.
- andrewflnr 13y agoHow does the dust levitate? I would think the moon itself needed to have an electric field to make that work.
- brownbat 13y agoFunny you should ask, we actually have a Lunar module studying this question right now: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Atmosphere_and_Dust_Environment_Explorer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Atmosphere_and_Dust_Envir... The NASA dust lab slides claimed it levitated right after noting that the dust particles had "charges approaching 10^4" (no units or context provided). I assumed that was related. In hindsight, maybe it isn't? Apparently, and I'm just learning all this right now, some scientists argue the dust is primarily ejected from the surface during meteor events. The earliest observations of "levitating" dust were from astronauts who noticed rays of light during/after the lunar sunset, suggesting the sunlight was bouncing off of something in the lunar "atmosphere."