Breathing Lunar Dust Could Give Astronauts Bronchitis and Even Lung Cancer
[In] a recent study, a team of pharmacologists, geneticists and geoscientists consider how being exposed to lunar dust could have a serious effect on future astronauts' lungs.
[...] Previous research has also shown that dust can cause damage to cells' DNA, which can cause mutations and eventually lead to cancer. For these reasons, Caston and her colleagues were well-motivated to see what harmful effects lunar soil could have on the human body. For the sake of their study, the team exposed human lung cells and mouse brain cells to samples of simulated lunar soil.
These simulants were created by using dust samples from Earth that resemble soil found on the Moon's lunar highlands and volcanic plains, which were then ground to a fine powder. What they found was that up to 90% of human lung cells and mouse neurons died when exposed to the dust samples. The simulants also caused significant DNA damage to mouse neurons, and the human lung cells were so effectively damaged that it was impossible to measure any damage to the cells' DNA.
Assessing Toxicity and Nuclear and Mitochondrial DNA Damage Caused by Exposure of Mammalian Cells to Lunar Regolith Simulants (open, DOI: 10.1002/2017GH000125) (DX)
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Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin are looking to partner with NASA and ESA to help create settlements on the Moon. However, he implied that he would fund development of such a project himself if governments don't:
Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos says his Blue Origin space venture will work with NASA as well as the European Space Agency to create a settlement on the moon. And even if Blue Origin can't strike public-private partnerships, Bezos will do what needs to be done to make it so, he said here at the International Space Development Conference on Friday night.
[...] To facilitate a return to the moon, Blue Origin has a lunar lander on the drawing boards that's designed to be capable of delivery 5 tons of payload to the lunar surface. That's hefty enough to be used for transporting people — and with enough support, it could start flying by the mid-2020s. Blue Origin has proposed building its Blue Moon lander under the terms of a public-private partnership with NASA. "By the way, we'll do that, even if NASA doesn't do it," Bezos said. "We'll do it eventually. We could do it a lot faster if there were a partnership."
[...] It's important to point out that moon settlement isn't just a NASA thing. Bezos told me he loves the European Space Agency's approach, known as the Moon Village. "The Moon Village concept has a nice property in that everybody basically just says, look, everybody builds their own lunar outpost, but let's do it close to each other. That way, if you need a cup of sugar, you can go over to the European Union lunar outpost and say, 'I got my powdered eggs, what have you got?' ... Obviously I'm being silly with the eggs, but there will be real things, like, 'Do you have some oxygen?' "
Around thirty customers, including the Kennedy Space Center, have purchased soil simulants from the University of Central Florida:
The University of Central Florida is selling Martian dirt, $20 a kilogram plus shipping. [...] "The simulant is useful for research as we look to go to Mars," says Physics Professor Dan Britt, a member of UCF's Planetary Sciences Group. "If we are going to go, we'll need food, water and other essentials. As we are developing solutions, we need a way to test how these ideas will fare." For example, scientists looking for ways to grow food on Mars — cue the 2015 film The Martian — need to test their techniques on soil that most closely resembles the stuff on Mars.
[...] As a geologist and a physicist, he knows his dirt. Like a recipe, the ingredients can be mixed in different ways to mimic soil from various objects, including asteroids and planets. And because the formula is based on scientific methods and is published for all to use, even those not ordering through UCF can create dirt that can be used for experiments, which reduces the uncertainty level.
Kevin Cannon, the paper's lead author and a post-doctoral researcher who works with Britt at UCF, says there are different types of soil on Mars and on asteroids. On Earth, for example, we have black sand, white sand, clay and topsoil to name a few. On other worlds, you might find carbon-rich soils, clay-rich soils and salt-rich soils, he added. "With this technique, we can produce many variations," Cannon says. "Most of the minerals we need are found on Earth although some are very difficult to obtain."
Mars global simulant MGS-1: A Rocknest-based open standard for basaltic martian regolith simulants (DOI: 10.1016/j.icarus.2018.08.019) (DX)
Related: What Kinds of Veggies Can We Grow on Mars? NASA Wants to Know.
Is Anything Tough Enough to Survive On Mars?
Preliminary Results: Potatoes Could Grow in Mars Conditions
Mars Soil Could be Made into Bricks with Pressure Alone
Lunar Regolith Simulants Damage Cells
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 08 2018, @07:47AM
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and so is Her Dust. Heinlen, I believe?
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 08 2018, @08:19AM (3 children)
Conclusion: When visiting the moon, don't take off your space suit helmet to breathe the fresh air.
(Not even if your spanner somehow ends up inside your helmet).
(Score: 5, Funny) by c0lo on Tuesday May 08 2018, @08:25AM
I know that lower gravity on the Moon makes it easier, but I still don't think jumping to conclusion is warranted.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 5, Funny) by realDonaldTrump on Tuesday May 08 2018, @11:52AM (1 child)
The air is fine, it's the dust that can be a big problem. Because it sticks to your suit. And it's very bad for the health, breathing it is as bad as smoking cigarettes. So you need to send your suit out to be cleaned A LOT. Big cleaning bills!!!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 08 2018, @01:56PM
4/5 You should have ended with a SAD, and maybe blame it on liberals.
(Score: 2) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Tuesday May 08 2018, @08:46AM (2 children)
What a ripoff... I'll stay in Pripyat like last year.
(Score: 3, Funny) by c0lo on Tuesday May 08 2018, @08:57AM (1 child)
Your loss, mate, you'll be missing the tranquility beaches, with their all-natural free range unfiltered sun shine and nanosize grained sand.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Funny) by bob_super on Tuesday May 08 2018, @04:51PM
The best parts: obese people are not wearing bathing suits, and you can't hear their beloved little monsters' constant screaming.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday May 08 2018, @01:46PM (4 children)
Seems simple enough: create an environment here on Earth with high concentrations of regolith (simulant one would imagine), then import a microbe population and let natural selection work it out. Once you've got a (non-toxic to humans) population of microbes that can handle the regolith, work up to farming crops in the dust, developing crops that filter out dangerous regolith particles from the air, etc.
I think this may be a major failing of "The Martian"'s plot-line. Mars dust will be more earthlike due to being worked over by some kind of atmosphere, but still likely very different from most earth soils due to the lack of exposure to any significant water cycle for (say it like Sagan) Billions of years. Matt Damon's poop probably wouldn't have been strong enough to make the red soil habitable for first generation potato roots.
Sounds scary, but I'm pretty sure the Apollo astronauts got at least some dust exposure on the trip home - that didn't seem to cause any instant-death.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by fritsd on Tuesday May 08 2018, @03:45PM (1 child)
There's no weathering by wind or water, but I wonder if small worms like C. elegans [wikipedia.org] could wear down the dust by eating it. IANABiologist, though, and I don't actually know very much about worms.
If they manage to reproduce in regolith soil, then each subsequent generation would have it a little bit easier because its parents have worn down the soil crystals a little bit.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday May 08 2018, @03:55PM
I'm thinking more along the lines of setting up some kind of dome, or artificial lights in a lava tube, and trying to farm in the natural soil there. Worms would be a good step in the process, taking the sharp edges off the grains. They're going to need something living in between the grains for them to eat.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by frojack on Tuesday May 08 2018, @08:31PM (1 child)
The problem here is not toxicity (whatever the hell that actually means), but simply SHAPE of the dust.
Un-Reduced, un-eroded fine granules with lots of sharp corners. Not dissimilar from air-born pumice, glacier dust, or any other rock source that has not been weathered into rounded shapes.
There's actually NOTHING in TFA that indicates actual moon soil has any harmful properties other than shape. They never tested moon soil.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday May 08 2018, @08:59PM
Agreed, it's the shape of the dust that's the challenge, but TFS stated: 90% death - meaning 10% survival, which means that - while some survivors just got lucky, others likely had structural differences that helped them to survive. They might have to float up a bath of survivors and let them regenerate in a less challenging environment before challenging them with the sharp bits again, or mix in some ratio of friendly soil to start, but after a few hundred generations there should be marked differences in the surviving colony.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday May 08 2018, @01:54PM (2 children)
Why was this study needed? It's been well-known that lunar regolith is nasty stuff for decades now; it's like breathing powdered asbestos, and probably worse. You don't need an expensive study to tell you this: I could have told you before this that any work on the Moon's surface needs to be treated like it's a giant asbestos-mediation project, with workers going through some sort of airlocks (which is needed because of the lack of atmosphere obviously) where they're not exposed to the outer parts of their suits at all and dust that adheres to their suits isn't allowed inside the decontaminated areas.
(Score: 3, Informative) by frojack on Tuesday May 08 2018, @08:37PM (1 child)
Well maybe you would like to use your vast knowledge on the subject to explain just how that stuff is going to be filtered.
One asbestos tile found in a ceiling is enough to shut down entire buildings these days.
There are just about no filter systems that can remove stuff this fine. (Its all about the size and irregular shape of these dust particles). All the water has to be filtered. All the air. All the suits and boots.
I suspect the best bet is get everything wet as soon as possible and try to hold onto the dust with water (maybe treated something that adheres to the dust). Then deal with the water somehow.
But unlike you, I've never been to the moon, and so I just have to guess.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday May 08 2018, @10:25PM
I never claimed to have a ready answer for exactly how to deal with moon dust, I only claimed to already know that the stuff is horribly toxic and does terrible stuff to your lungs. It's not just me, this has been common knowledge for decades now. I'm questioning why they needed to do a study now, in 2018, on human and mice cells to tell them this; we've had real moon dust since around 1970 and have examined it very thoroughly, and we already knew this stuff was really bad, just like we know asbestos dust is really bad.
Were they trying to figure out if it's "not that bad" and they don't need serious filtration systems? This stuff is obviously worse than asbestos even, so that shouldn't have even been a consideration. As you pointed out, just a little bit of asbestos is treated like a biohazard these days, and for good reason (it never gets out of your lungs).
(Score: 2, Funny) by Kalas on Tuesday May 08 2018, @02:26PM (3 children)
So you're saying I really shouldn't put any of my lung or brain cells on a petri dish with some regolith? That's easy enough to avoid doing.
Hell, I'm not doing that right now!
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday May 08 2018, @04:59PM (2 children)
"While on the moon, do not preform trepanations without vacuuming the floor first".
Dang, that's a tough one to remember. Can you add that to the spaceship's safety posters?
(Score: 3, Informative) by frojack on Tuesday May 08 2018, @09:05PM (1 child)
You can't reliably vacuum this stuff because you end up blowing it around even more.
The dust used in this study was ground to ≤7μm in size, the best approximation of moon dust they could come up with.
While that is still large enough to be trapped by the best hepa filters on the market, (0.3-microns), the reason they stopped at 7 microns is that the processing and handling and containment would become too expensive and dangerous to go much finer.
Lunar samples go much finer than this study. Some small enough to slip from the lungs directly into the blood stream.
https://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/nlsc2008/pdf/2072.pdf [usra.edu]
The study in this TFS is largely redundant with the pdf linked above from 2008.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday May 08 2018, @09:13PM
All three samples contain a significant number of particles <2.5 μm.
Because of the high abundances of these small
particles and their unique chemistry (glass with npFe0),
these particles once in the respiratory system
could remain in the lungs and cause severe lung fibrosis
or other diseases, or for the <100 nm grains", they
might even enter directly into the blood system, where
the metallic np-Fe could interact to reduce the Fe3+ in
the hemoglobin.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.