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Palomar

Member

From: USA

Registered: 2002-05-30

Posts: 9,734

Re: Moondust: Why So Clingy?

Yeah, what's up with that?

*What...we'll have to take a veritable armada of Swiffers to the Moon with us??   

NASA is studying individual grains of moondust returned by Apollo astronauts to how much charge they can build up, and the results have been surprising.  Ultraviolet radiation can give a grain of moondust 10 times more charge than the theories had calculated.

Many researchers believe that moondust has a severe case of static cling: it's electrically charged. In the lunar daytime, intense ultraviolet (UV) light from the sun knocks electrons out of the powdery grit. Dust grains on the moon's daylit surface thus become positively charged.

Eventually, the repulsive charges become so strong that grains are launched off the surface "like cannonballs," says Abbas, arcing kilometers above the moon until gravity makes them fall back again to the ground.  The moon may have a virtual atmosphere of this flying dust, sticking to astronauts from above and below.

They'll need to know, how does moondust behave around the clock?

Why don't we not worry about it and just go on to Mars instead? 

--Cindy

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We all know [i]those[/i] Venusians: Doing their hair in shock waves, smoking electrical coronas, wearing Van Allen belts and resting their tiny elbows on a Geiger counter...

--John Sladek (The New Apocrypha)

SpaceNut

Administrator

From: New Hampshire

Registered: 2004-07-22

Posts: 29,431

Re: Moondust: Why So Clingy?

We have talked a little bit about how the dust gets into everything in the moon direct thread as well as in the spacesuit one as well. There was as I recall a design to discharge the area around the base camp that was to incorporate some techniques for sheilding the astronauts from the solar energy that might be hazardous to them in the moon thread as well.

Mars thou it has a static build up charge problem as generated from the dust devils it is no where near the problem as it is on the moon.

cjchandler

Member

From: canada

Registered: 2006-06-24

Posts: 138

Re: Moondust: Why So Clingy?

I read an article once that said that moon dust could be solidified or melted together with ordinary microwave equitment. I guess the technical term is sintereing.  So one could just zap the dust on the ground and not have to worry about it anymore. Of course that's kind of a mundane use, I was thinking that it might be possible to build a sort of 3D printer that blew moon dust from a resovoir using mini railguns to build large objects. It would blow a layer on and then zap it with microwaves to stabalize it. Might work even better in orbit as the lack of gravity could allow abituarily large structured to be printed. Great for solar collectors and spacecraft hulls.
here's the link http://www.space.com/adastra/adastra_mo … 60223.html

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Ad astra per aspera!