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Building Bricks on the Moon from Lunar Dust

posted by martyb on Friday August 24 2018, @02:57AM   Printer-friendly
from the Lunar-Legos® dept.

"exec" writes:

In the coming decades, many space agencies hope to conduct crewed missions to the Moon and even establish outposts there. In fact, between NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), Roscosmos, and the Indian and Chinese space agencies, there are no shortages of plans to construct lunar bases and settlements. These will not only establish a human presence on the Moon, but facilitate missions to Mars and deeper into space.

For instance, the ESA is planning on building an "international lunar village" on the Moon by the 2030s. As the spiritual successor to the International Space Station (ISS), this village would also allow for scientific research in a lunar environment. Currently, European researchers are planning how to go about constructing this village, which includes conducting experiments with lunar dust simulants to create bricks.

To put it simply, the entire surface of the Moon is covered in dust (aka. regolith) that is composed of fine particles of rough silicate. This dust was formed over the course of billions of years by constant meteorite impacts which pounded the silicate mantle into fine particles. It has remained in a rough and fine state due to the fact that the lunar surface experiences no weathering or erosion (due to the lack of an atmosphere and liquid water).

[...] before the ESA can sign off on lunar dust as a building material, a number of tests still need to be conducted. These include recreating the behavior of lunar dust in a radiation environment to simulate their electrostatic behavior. For decades, scientists have known that lunar dust is electrically-charged because of the way it is constantly bombarded by solar and cosmic radiation.

[...] At present, the ESA plans to build their international lunar village in southern polar region, where plentiful water ice has been discovered. To investigate this, the ESA will be sending their Package for Resource Observation and in-Situ Prospecting for Exploration, Commercial exploitation and Transportation (PROSPECT) mission to the Moon in 2020, which will be travelling as part of the Russian Luna-27 mission.

https://www.universetoday.com/139810/building-bricks-on-the-moon-from-lunar-dust/

-- submitted from IRC

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 24 2018, @03:52AM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 24 2018, @03:52AM (#725600)

    Doctorow: Yeah, I really need to get working on that one. I’m working on a story about “burners” — people who go to Burning Man — who experiment with a 3-D printer that they can leave on the playa — on the gypsum desert — that harvests gypsum dust and turns it into a yurt over the couple of months that it takes for Burning Man to start, using solar energy. And so this autonomous, habitat-building, 3-D printer robot gives them the idea of building one that can print out using lunar regolith — moon dust. And they land a lunar printer on the moon using private space exploration vehicles, and they direct its operations from a ground-based wiki that can bounce new messages to it — new firmware to it or new instructions to it — using ham radios that bounce signals off the moon. And over the course of a generation they direct its operations to build a lunar habitat that their grandchildren can move into.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 24 2018, @05:11AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 24 2018, @05:11AM (#725637)

    I heard there was a guy at burning man who was on mushrooms for a month. People would just leave out food and water in the desert and hed come grab it like some sort of biblical age prophet. At the end he had quit all his addictions (booze, cigarettes, etc).

    • (Score: 2) by Freeman on Friday August 24 2018, @04:53PM (1 child)

      by Freeman (732) on Friday August 24 2018, @04:53PM (#725901) Journal

      All except Shrooms?

      --
      Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"