from the it's-a-dirty-job-but-someone-really-has-to-do-it dept.
Dealing with dust: A back-to-the-moon dilemma - SpaceNews:
The next chapter in the U.S. human exploration of the moon, the Artemis Project, will dispatch crews there for extended periods of time, building upon Apollo's heritage. Between 1969 and the end of 1972, a dozen astronauts kicked up the powdery regolith, the topside dirt of the moon. But there's one flash back message from the Apollo moonwalkers worth heeding: the place is a Disneyland of dust.
[...] "I think dust is probably one of our greatest inhibitors to a nominal operation on the moon. I think that we can overcome other physiological or physical or mechanical problems except dust," said mission commander Eugene Cernan. "One of the most aggravating, restricting facets of lunar surface exploration is the dust and its adherence to everything no matter what kind of material, whether it be skin, suit material, metal, no matter what it be and its restrictive friction-like action to everything it gets on," said lunar module pilot and geologist, Harrison Schmitt.
Study groups and technologists are assessing ways to lessen the negative impact of lunar dust on the astronauts, their equipment, and surface operations.
NASA Report:
Daniel Winterhalter, et al. Lunar Dust and Its Impact on Human Exploration: A NASA Engineering and Safety Center (NESC) Workshop, NASA Technical Reports Server (Link: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20205008219)
Related Stories
One small grain of moon dust, one giant leap for lunar studies:
"We're analyzing rocks from space, atom by atom," says Jennika Greer, the paper's first author and a PhD student at the Field Museum and University of Chicago. " It's the first time a lunar sample has been studied like this. We're using a technique many geologists haven't even heard of.
"We can apply this technique to samples no one has studied," Philipp Heck, a curator at the Field Museum, associate professor at the University of Chicago, and co-author of the paper, adds. "You're almost guaranteed to find something new or unexpected. This technique has such high sensitivity and resolution, you find things you wouldn't find otherwise and only use up a small bit of the sample."
The technique is called atom probe tomography (APT), and it's normally used by materials scientists working to improve industrial processes like making steel and nanowires. But its ability to analyze tiny amounts of materials makes it a good candidate for studying lunar samples. The Apollo 17 sample contains 111 kilograms (245 pounds) of lunar rocks and soil -- the grand scheme of things, not a whole lot, so researchers have to use it wisely. Greer's analysis only required one single grain of soil, about as wide as a human hair. In that tiny grain, she identified products of space weathering, pure iron, water and helium, that formed through the interactions of the lunar soil with the space environment. Extracting these precious resources from lunar soil could help future astronauts sustain their activities on the Moon.
To study the tiny grain, Greer used a focused beam of charged atoms to carve a tiny, super-sharp tip into its surface. This tip was only a few hundred atoms wide -- for comparison, a sheet of paper is hundreds of thousands of atoms thick. "We can use the expression nanocarpentry," says Philipp Heck. "Like a carpenter shapes wood, we do it at the nanoscale to minerals."
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday December 27 2020, @08:39PM
Allow smokers into the astronaut program.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 27 2020, @09:04PM (4 children)
When it gets too dusty on construction sites (and on dirt race tracks), the normal solution is to hose it down.
Now, where can we get that amount of water on the moon?
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday December 27 2020, @09:17PM
Just fetch yourself a nice ice asteroid, and set it down on the moon. Don't blame me if the moonflowers start blooming, and it turns into a jungle. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jzhy2CSPqpA [youtube.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 27 2020, @10:34PM (2 children)
water sublimates in space and on the moon
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 27 2020, @10:36PM (1 child)
Wooosh!
(the sound of the op water joke going over your head)
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 28 2020, @12:35AM
♫I'm being followed by a Moon-shower, Moon-shower, moon-shower. Slipping and sliding in a Moon-shower, Moon-shower, moon-shower!
And if I bend over, to fetch the soap, I won't fall and I won't mope. ♫
(Score: 3, Funny) by RamiK on Sunday December 27 2020, @10:50PM
Now, a giant sweep for maid kind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7aeWQCF1jM [youtube.com]
compiling...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 27 2020, @11:25PM
Usenet covered this decades ago, in alt.pave.the.earth. Just alt.pave.the.moon.
(Score: 2) by fakefuck39 on Sunday December 27 2020, @11:31PM (30 children)
dust on mars was all the hype a few years back. then it completely disappeared from the news as a problem. and on mars, the dust is much finer, sticks to shit much better, and oh - there's major dust storms. I'd say if there's an issue with dust on the moon, it'll be 10x on mars. but surprisingly, for the equipment already on mars it hasn't been too much of a problem.
so then the problem becomes what they mention at the end, which has nothing to do with equipment operating outside, but getting dust inside a habitable area. and I got the perfect solution for that. years ago, I bought a very expensive hepa filter that does a wonderful job. I tried running it for a month and now that fucker just sits there, collecting dust. the casing is a big plastic box, and it seems the acoustics of it act like a resonant amplifier - that fucker is loud.
so i got you moon travelers. you can have my overpriced chinese made, american assembled hepa filter, and i even got extra filters for you. it's got an activated carbon layer too, so your moon-farts won't smell. and you can have it for free.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 27 2020, @11:35PM (14 children)
> now that fucker just sits there, collecting dust
sound like it's working. wtf are you bitching about?
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by fakefuck39 on Sunday December 27 2020, @11:46PM (13 children)
I thought i made that pretty clear retard. learn to read plain english. the hepa filter *also filters out the smell of farts, due to a charcoal layer - but it has to be on for that, which is too loud. sheesh, some people and their confusion..
I'm not down with milk. That started happening in my early 20s. It's not the lactose though, since I tried lactaid to no avail, and drink fairlife which has lactose mostly filtered out. So I'm stuck - it's either farts or give up milk. and i ain't givin up my fuckin milk. if i did, the tall black milkman who delivers it to my back porch would be out of a job, and i have investments and don't want the economy to go down.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday December 28 2020, @01:43AM (1 child)
Pics, or it didn't happen.
The milkman is always a blonde blue-eyed German, or a wormy little Englishman.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by fakefuck39 on Monday December 28 2020, @04:10AM
umm, huh? the traditional american milk man is a black guy in a sparkling white outfit, complete with teeth. i don't know what kind of weird german gay porn you watch, but we're in america. we don't take kindly to germans, and we like watching fat hairy white men get railed by niggers with some girth on them, not skinny proper englishmen.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Reziac on Monday December 28 2020, @02:56AM (8 children)
When it's not lactose -- there are two kinds of casein in milk. Some people cannot digest one of them. But they've also managed to breed cows that only produce one or the other. And sometimes you can find milk so labeled. Then it's just experiment til you discover which one doesn't agree with you.
Ha! Found the article:
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/1017/new_milk.php3 [jewishworldreview.com]
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by fakefuck39 on Monday December 28 2020, @03:47AM (7 children)
this isn't as much news as you falling for a marketing ploy of a large corporation. there were two types of cows, with a type A and B protein. We're mostly left with type A now. A company decided to sell premium milk that comes from type B cows, claiming it's that protein people were allergic to. this has zero actual scientific basis, except for the single study paid for by that milk company.
maybe stop reading the jewish world review, christian news channel, and i'm gonna go on a limb here, and in your case say newsmax as well. maybe pass 8th grade biology too. i seriously don't know how you got your ged with that little education.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Reziac on Monday December 28 2020, @04:01AM (6 children)
Hookay. Sorry I tried to help. I don't suppose you've actually tried it. A smattering of biochemistry might help your understanding.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by fakefuck39 on Monday December 28 2020, @04:14AM (5 children)
I literally drank that for 4 years when living in france. organic chemistry was my minor in college for 2 years, although not biochemistry. i don't need a biochemistry degree to see that some marketing company sponsored the study that said their milk is the best. i just need to not lack critical thinking. let me help: a source that has "jewish" in the title is not a source for science, just like a source that has "christian" or "muslim" in the title is not for science. because science has nothing to do with religious beliefs, and if your source for science is from a religious publication, it usually means they don't know what they're talking about, because if they did, they wouldn't be into religion in the first place.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Monday December 28 2020, @05:55AM (4 children)
So if you drank that shit that long, maybe there's something to it, eh?
JWR is an aggregator; it doesn't author anything. As happens that article was originally pubbed by the Washington Post, so perhaps you should turn your scorn on them instead.
Biochem major myself, tho probably before you were born.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by fakefuck39 on Monday December 28 2020, @07:04AM (3 children)
yes, if I drank milk that gave me gas for 4 years, there's definitely something to it. like gas. eh? i still drink milk today. it still gives me gas. i'm ok with that. you on the other hand seem to think this proves the milk doesn't give people gas. which probably explains why you get your science news from a religious site. yes, it's an aggregator. tell me, did you get your biochemistry major from Jesus University or from Muhammad College? because religious sites are not where people go to get their science.
so, biochem boy, who clearly is genX like myself, please pray tell (we know you a-student biochem majors like to pray because you're all about god). what is it about that B cow milk protein that makes people not gassy? Now me, I don't know. All I know is that a single study proving so, done by the manufacturer of the product and not peer-reviewed, is literally zero evidence of the claim.
I get it. To you, that corporate marketing sham/scam is evidence. Because you lack critical thinking. My evidence for that? You get your science news from a religious site. For a religion that believes a sky entity created Adam, then created a woman for him from his rib, then they ate apples and fucked everyone else into creation. And the earth is 6k years old. Tell me, guy with fake biochemistry major, how does that fit in to what you learned in college?
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Monday December 28 2020, @08:07AM (2 children)
As it happens, I'm not a believer, and never have been. And I'm somewhat older than GenX. You sure make a lot of unfounded assumptions.... and a normal person, when offered a friendly suggestion for something one might look at, doesn't respond with (paraphrasing) "you're an idiot and an asshole" and then shoot the messenger, but rather might say something like, sorry, already tried that and doesn't seem there's anything to it, and besides yonder is the perhaps-compromised study.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by fakefuck39 on Monday December 28 2020, @08:27AM (1 child)
a normal person, on an open forum of anonymous random strangers, given a friendly suggestion on science, based on zero valid information besides marketing, taken from a religious website, tells the "suggester" he's an idiot, points an internet finger at the idiot, and laughs.
here's a suggestion for you, the guy who is older than genx so born before 1965, going to school when the doctors from his biochemistry class were recommending smoking cigarettes. I know you're overweight. Here's a diet tip for you I found from a study done by the sugar industry. Literally the same suggestion as you gave me. Unfortunately, I could not find the supporting article on a religious website for you.
https://www.zinzin.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/ad-sugar-diet-hint.jpg [zinzin.com]
hope you lose that weight ya old fattie. if you don't like my suggestion for you, no biggie, just trying to give you some friendly advice.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Monday December 28 2020, @03:03PM
Sorry, 19 on the BMI and never did have any of those stupid habits, but thanks for the sage advice.
JWR is a mainline *political opinion* aggregator. It was the original home for articles by Dr. Walter E. Williams (Dr. Thomas Sowell and Victor Davis Hanson were also regulars long before they hit the big time). Owner happens to be Jewish, and it's his personal project, so that's what he named it, 22 years ago. Rarely, it'll have some inspiration-in-everyday-life written by a rabbi, or whatever else catches his eye, but it's not a "religious site".
Just as a FYI, I'm the sucker who modded up your rant on Israel... thought it made an interesting point.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 28 2020, @02:28PM
Could be that your microbiome shifted as you moved around and ate different stuff.
(Score: 2) by martyb on Monday December 28 2020, @03:13PM
HEPA literally stands for High efficiency particulate air [filter]" [epa.gov].
I thought it was a great joke; that your filter is "collecting dust", well isn't that what a HEPA filter is supposed to do?
:^)
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 27 2020, @11:45PM (5 children)
Dust storms are a problem, but at least Mars has wind to grind the dust down. The Moon dust is worse.
(Score: 2) by fakefuck39 on Sunday December 27 2020, @11:48PM (4 children)
So, from what I read, it's literally the opposite. That wind that grinds the dust down on mars doesn't make it go away - it just makes it super fine, and that causes much more of a problem than the immensely larger moon dust.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martian_soil#Atmospheric_dust [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Monday December 28 2020, @01:44AM (3 children)
Finer perhaps, but not as sharp.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by VacuumTube on Monday December 28 2020, @07:41AM (2 children)
Strictly speaking, finer is sharper.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 28 2020, @02:49PM
Not exactly. Lunar regolith is all sharp edges. Mars dust may well be finer on average, but it'll be like tiny river rocks, not like tiny flaked flint arrowheads. It'll still be a problem, but moon dust is a bigger problem over all.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday December 28 2020, @07:18PM
Right here on earth, you would think that sand is sand - and you would be mistaken. It was established quite well in WW2 that ocean front sand was a poor substitute from sand-pit sand, primarily because of the salt content. However, ocean front sand is mostly round or rounded thanks to constant washing by the water. Sand pit sand is is rough and edged. That roughness makes it far more suitable for concrete, than any rounded sand, even after being washed.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Monday December 28 2020, @03:40AM (8 children)
Dust on Mars is still a problem.it degrades solar cell performance- would be nice to put a feather duster on an arm (except that static electricity buildup would prevent it from working.
If there were some air on the moon, I'd say get a Dustbuster. Or a shopvac. But since there's no air, gotta go with an electrostatic ion gun and a charged plate.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2) by fakefuck39 on Monday December 28 2020, @04:29AM (4 children)
so this i would think would actually be a good solution. if the moon dust keeps getting hit by radiation, it has to be ionized. meaning a large magnet can suck it off, and that can be powered by a solar battery or something.
i'm pretty sure i read that on mars it's actually the wind that kicks enough dust off to keep things not at 100%, but working to an extent. no such luck on the moon.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday December 28 2020, @09:35AM (3 children)
Ionized ≠ magnetized.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by fakefuck39 on Monday December 28 2020, @10:08AM (2 children)
what's your point? magnets can absolutely deflect ions. as in you have a bunch of ionic dust, and the magnet will make sure it doesn't get on you. now, if you said "not suck it off but push it off" you'd be technically correct, but it would ruin the implied blowjob, and you would be no fun.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Monday December 28 2020, @05:13PM (1 child)
Um... not so much.
Magnets deflect *moving* electric charges (net electrical currents), with an acceleration proportional to how fast the charge is moving through the magnetic field. And the thing with dust is - it tends to move slowly. And that will be especially true near the surface of the moon, where gravity is low, and the entire surface is similarly charged and thus has an "antigrav" effect on the dust, slowing its fall as it approaches. Not enough to keep it from settling, but as Apollo-era dust-measuring experiments have shown, the dust kicked up by the astronauts kept settling in the area for weeks after they had left.
(Score: 2) by fakefuck39 on Tuesday December 29 2020, @12:31AM
https://youtu.be/fP7ZnP_STjQ?t=78 [youtu.be]
if you still don't know why you're wrong, after watching that, i can explain. but warning - i will make fun of you if I have to explain.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 28 2020, @04:34AM
Thinking out loud, how about a conductive (and grounded) "feather duster", perhaps made from carbon fibers?
(Score: 2) by VacuumTube on Monday December 28 2020, @07:47AM
Mars has a little bit of an atmosphere. It even has an occasional dust storm.
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 28 2020, @08:58PM
https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=41274&page=1&cid=1091104#commentwrap [soylentnews.org] and https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=41274&page=1&cid=1091785#commentwrap [soylentnews.org] and https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=41274&page=1&cid=1091114#commentwrap [soylentnews.org] prove my subject line's point. You are a lying filthy welfare sucking worthless bullshitter and when confronted by others who are your superiors it shows proving my assessment of you, delusional failure as a man thinking it is a real woman in your fucked up self freako. Ah, the public DUSTING of delusional crazo barbarahudson. Amusing but fact.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 28 2020, @12:26AM
thrust it
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday December 28 2020, @01:44AM (1 child)
Seriously - if you've had sex on the beach, raise your hand!
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 28 2020, @04:40AM
Ha, brought back a funny memory from early 1980s. First time I got to the CA coast (growing up in the east), I decided to camp out on the beach (solo, next to the car). This was well north of SF, the beach was gorgeous, and empty too. It turned out to be a pretty unpleasant evening, a cool breeze kicked up and everything got full of sand. So I learned my lesson without having to upset any gals.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 28 2020, @07:42AM (2 children)
Gallium is a metal with a very low melting point. It can melt in your hand.
For the moon base entrance, make it a U-shaped tunnel full of molten gallium. People in space suits pull themselves down into the molten gallium using handrails, then float up to the other side. That cleans off the moon dust. The molten gallium also provides a perfect seal against air leakage. You don't even need a door! The air pressure on the inside will make the gallium level lower on that side, which is fine. It's actually usable for measuring the pressure. Observe the level on both sides of the entrance, subtract to find the difference, and use the density of gallium to get a pressure reading.
Moon dust will float on the gallium. If it builds up into a thick layer, more than a couple inches, scoop it away with a flat-bottom shovel.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 28 2020, @01:53PM
Sorry, gallium is out of stock at Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/Gallium-99-99-Pure-000g-Kilogram/dp/B0151SRSPK [amazon.com]
<sarcasm>If Amazon can't get it, omg, it must be completely unavailable </sarcasm>
Oh, wait, looks like Jack Ma can sell me some ...
https://www.alibaba.com/showroom/gallium-metal-1kg-price.html [alibaba.com]
...assuming he's still in business? Heard that he's currently having a bit of a spat with the bosses in China. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/24/technology/china-jack-ma-alibaba.html [nytimes.com]
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Monday December 28 2020, @06:27PM
Puts a whole new spin on the term "moon pool", doesn't it?
Gallium may have some issues since it's electrically conductive so could short out imperfectly sealed electronics, might alloy with metals passing through it, and is completely opaque, which would make climbing through it a bitch. Don't drop anything important at the bottom of the pool. And heaven forbid you have to fix a leak in the pool walls. Not to mention gallium is toxic and rapidly corrodes aluminum, which is likely to be a very common building material on the moon. Mercury has similar problems.
However, there's lots of options other than gallium for a "moon pool" style airlock. Really, there's only two must-have qualities for a moon-pool airlock fluid: it has to be liquid at temperatures that won't damage things moving through it, and it has to have a low enough vapor pressure that it won't evaporate quickly in vacuum. And evaporation rates could be dramatically lowered by adding a (mostly) airtight door on the outside end. There's lots of transparent, low-reactivity liquids that could do the job, though most of them would probably have to be shipped from Earth.
Another big concern is density, and the effect on airlock depth - the airlock is essentially a barometer, with the difference between the interior and exterior pools determined by density. Using water as a reference, 1 atmosphere of pressure = 10m difference on Earth, or about 60m difference on the moon. That'd be an awful long ladder to climb, even underwater at low g. Of course you could have some sort of elevator, but it still means that either the moonpool within your base would have to be 60m lower than the one outside. Unless you want to build your moonbase deep underground (which does have benefits), you're probably talking a deep pit with an elevator bringing you back up the air side.
Gallium is 5.9x denser than water, which means it'd only need a 10.1 meter difference, or a bit over three storeys. Still a bit dramatic. Mercury's substantially denser at about 13.5x water, so would only need a 4.5 meters difference, about 1.5 storeys. Still far enough that you'd probably want an elevator, especially for the trip down through the liquid, where your extreme buoyancy in the dense liquid would practically pin you to the ceiling.