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Lunar Dust: A Major Worry for Moon Visitors
smooth wombat writes "Wired has a story which talks about a danger to possible future inhabitants of the Moon that is rarely brought up: the highly abrasive lunar dust. Unlike Earth, the Moon has no erosive capabilities to smooth the edges of rocks or dust. As a result the lunar dust has arms that stick out, like Velcro, and sticks to everything. As the astronauts who walked on the moon found out, the dust scratched lenses and corroded seals within hours. Some of the particles are only microns across which means once they get into your lungs, they stay there. This could cause a lung disease similar to silicosis."
Who do we have to thank about that? The smokers of the world!
Just think. Iron lungs, operations, tracheotomies, breathing machines, voice boxes, all that. All that moon dust that's gonna end up in your lungs? Second hand dust, just like second hand smoke. Right? Right.
All the technology to handle lung disease is already here. You should be thanking the tobacco companies right now. Or... you should be lighting up... to umm, help your lungs adjust to the moon dust... Yeah!
I for one salute the smokers of this world, for giving us the technology to explore and survive on the moon and in outer space.
---
This joke was brought to you by camel cigarettes. Now light up, maggots!
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
that biodomes will be clean. All the sci-fi movies had moon cities in a giant biodome! Anyone who goes outside and interacts with the dust gets cleaned on the way back in
sounds like moon dust has similar properties to asbestos. So small that it gets stuck in lungs and such...I have no idea if it's as resilient as asbestos is though...any clues?
If you don't want someone to copy something, don't give it to anyone.
As the astronauts who walked on the moon found out, the dust scratched lenses and corroded seals within hours. Some of the particles are only microns across which means once they get into your lungs, they stay there. This could cause a lung disease similar to silicosis.
I wonder if breathing a vaccum without 'dust' in the air would cause a lung disease too?
"There's no success like failure, and failure's no success at all."
- Bob Dylan
Some of the particles are only microns across which means once they get into your lungs, they stay there. This could cause a lung disease similar to silicosis.
I think that if you're freely breathing in dust with no protection between you and the lunar surface, you've got bigger issues to worry about than silicosis.
Lunar dust (loo-near duhst)n.
Highly abrasive and difficult to remove.
see Republicans
Sorry, I accidently RTFA.
The Apollo astronauts couldn't help but get covered in the stuff as they struggled to stay upright on the moon's surface, where the force of gravity is one-sixth of that on Earth. Later, they tracked the dust back into their space capsules and inhaled it when they took off their helmets.
It won't happen again.
riding round the world on an old motorcycle
Sounds like the makings of a "dirty bomb".
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
We can help. If you have been injured by dust not of this earth we can help. Call Dewey, Keetum and Howe 999.000.04~4 Now, time is slipping away you could lose your chance to get money for your injuries.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
That is something they most certainly would plan on doing once they return to the space capsule.
Moreover, once you have a permanent base, thing are going to get that much worse. It is extraordinarily hard to keep micron-sized particles out completely whenever you enter and exit the airlock.
So if the radiation, metorites, temperature, subversive crewmembers, psychotic computers, lack of air, fuel, or water doesn't get you... the dirt will.
...I'd still go.
(strip soft/first post?)
This dust could get everywhere. Sooner or later you take off your space suit, you track dust into the biodome on your boots, you park the moon buggy in the garage, etc. Dust just a few microns has the potential to work its way all through air circulation systems, etc. It'll be a nightmare to deal with.
Slashdot beaten by Fark (this was posted days ago).. A sad sad day for /.
2 + 2 = 5. Big Brother's watching you. bonglord.com
When you go back into the shuttle/station/building, you trek dust in with you.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
Don't mod this guy up. He is a whore for his site. Just look at his history, all he does is post worthless articles that are semi-ontopic that link to his site.
If the turnover rate of information is 40+ years (From the moon landing till now) I think we might have a slight latency gap of informaiton flow.
Also, with these particles getting caught in the lungs, isnt the whole "lack of oxygen on the moon" probably, a bigger breathing threat?
Damnit. All I've ever wanted to do was send all the lawyers to the moon .. but now it seems they'll serve a purpose there... looks like the sun is our only option!
"Dust is the No. 1 environmental problem on the moon,"
And here I thought it was the lack of segnificant atmosphere. Silly me.
Although I do think it is great that we are considering other major problems.
Just tell the astronauts to hold their breath when they go outside.
Disconnect your television. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. They're probably lying. Don't be a sheep.
Finally an environment I was BUILT to survive in. Having gone to the desert at the end of August for the last 4 years, I know DUST. I know the feeling of contact lenses gritty with it, zippers of tents being destroyed after only one week exposure to it, taking a shower feeling dry and fresh for all of maybe 5 seconds before your skin has that fine gritty coating on it again. Bring on the moon!
"As the astronauts who walked on the moon found out, the dust scratched lenses and corroded seals within hours." I don't think the problem is with the dust getting into your lung, even thought that could be a serious one; however, I doubt ppl actually take deep breathe out in the open, and the air lock should be able to remove the dust with a strong air filter. I believe the real problem is with the structure of the house ON the moon surface. It said that it scratched lenses and corroded seals within hours which mean that any windows and air lock seals will be damage. The cost of the constant repair for the damage might be the cost issue here. I am not sure if I am getting it all right, but that is the problem as I see. What do you ppl think?
Toner cartridges carry a distribution of particle sizes that are considered 'safe' for you to inhale because they can't stick in your lungs.
;P
You can also make toner with such a small particle size distribution it is actually taken into the blood stream and excreted, well, normally.
You get into trouble, however, when you get into particle sizes between the two of those ranges (Which escape me ATM).
That sized dust goes into the lung and stays there- too large to get absorbed, too small to get exhaled out.
It will also exhibit most of the properties of statically charged nano-particulates: It gets everywhere, fast.
There may be a 'clean room' to disengage the suits, but no matter how you adjust for the problem (save going underwater in an ultrasonic scrubber) that dust will move with you.
Maybe installation of those 'ion-breeze' units from SharperImage will fix it....
Do volcanos even have lungs?
This could cause a lung disease similar to silicosis.
Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicolunarosis!!!
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
The Chinese have OSHA?
The landings were quite real. They had a full 48-bit mantissa and 16-bit exponent.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
WTF does soon mean?
How we know is more important than what we know.
I wont take any deep breaths while I'm on the moon. Thanks for the heads up!
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Just take some dust-slaying Nano-shurikens of Doom with you (TG is owned by OSTG, the parent company of Slashdot, so activate all conspiracy theories now). They'll take care of it, whoop-ass style.
While you're there, you can also look into the new iPod accessory iCopulate which allows intimacy between mp3 players never before fantasized. And for the suit that has everything, Executve Pong. There's also Alarm Pills that help you wake up and fall asleep and a new USB-powered Fundue set available.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
/)
You are arguing the Republicans are mooning us...?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
He's a plagarist.
Google sentences from his "articles" and see for yourself.
you can't create an atmosphere on the moon; at least not one like ours on Earth. The primary gasses we have on the Earth's atmosphere would, over time, all achieve escape velocity and fly away. maybe in theory if you used heavy enough fluids...
Just hire the spaceballs & their Mega Maid. Operation Vacu-suck seemed to work on Druidia
I'm not sure it would be as much of a problem as it seems. We already have decontamination proceedures set up and in place for dealing with hazmat responce. The airlock could contain a forcful shower that recycle the water being used and basicaly hose the dust wich become mud off. Also chemicals could be added to disolve anything that the water would miss. Then a positive force air/gas flow could be applied to filter anyhting remaining out(if there would be). This would basicaly be a self contained system and could easily be modified from somethign already in existance.
Something like this for the suites, a respirator then doing it again for the person should eliminate enough of the threat to make it little to worry about. As for abrasions on boots or lences? There could be a sleaved system that slides over them to take the blunt of the damage like sock or contact lences. These could be clearned and reused several times until they become unsafe or unproductive.
Of course this would be more suitable for permanent structures then it would be for landing craft. Somethign that could be done to litigate the risk would be to have a second landing vehicle with the neccesary componants and then have the landing craft dock with it after landing. The second lander could be motorized and have the ability to manuver to different parts of the moon by remote control to make it more convientient and less expensive. Once permanent structures are made, there would be little need for them again unless they can be fabricated into the the desing of the biodomes (whatever) and become one of it's functional clean room. It might even be able to goto the landing craft, pickup visitors and return them to the permanent structures to reduce the risk of colision when landing a craft at the building.
This fits so well in my little imaginary moon world. The shuttles could land far enough away to not endanger the settlement and the left over mision decontaminators become the airport shuttles. I bet there could even be a loading dock built into them so supplies could be lifted out of the cargo bay with the arm and placed directly on the transport like a shiping container.
Nah, that kind of suit is way too porous for this kind of dust.
We should have a betting pool on how many people point out that you're not supposed to breathe outside on the moon. Thanks folks, I never knew that. Seriously, the stuff sounds like playa dust to me, and anybody who's ever been out on the playa knows that you track that stuff in with you all the time. If lunar dust is half as pervasive as playa dust, it's going to take serious decontamination to keep it outside.
If you are returning to a space port in the US, we noe require a passport. If not, you may be required to stay on the moon and die, or even worse, go to Canada.
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
Come on NASA, how hard could it be?
- Lightweight jumpsuits you wear on the outside of your pressure suit, which you put on and take off in the airlock.
- Blow the site clean with gas jets or ions before you go for a walk. There no wind -- once the dust is gone, it's not coming back any time soon.
- Mag-cloride does a bang up job gumming the road dust together here on earth, spray the site with some before you get out of the capsule. You can be sure it will dry fast.
- The dust is only inches thick. Use a broom. Move the dust out of your normal outside work areas. Don't just wallow in it like a moon-billy. Act civilized!
Liberty you never use is liberty you lose.
Sorry, being lunar today.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Can't we just fuse it all into glass with a few thousands well placed nukes?
No, that would blow it flat out of orbit, resulting in some really bad sci-fi. PLEASE don't do that.
Tag lost or not installed.
This is such a stupid concern. As for breathing it, do the same thing moms have done for 2000 years, don't let people wear dirty stuff inside.
There is no reason you would need to expose the INSIDE of the structure you live in to the OUTSIDE of the suit. Design the suit so that getting into the suit is the same as leaving the dust-free area. That means sort of 'docking' it. That way you are only exposed to the inside of the suit, never the outside.
Obviously you will have to repair and maintain the suit. When this comes up you'll have to clean it before bringing it in. At least you won't have to clean it after every use, and you won't need complicated (heavy, thus expensive) equipment to dedust people who go outside for 10 minutes to check something. Plus, no deduster means no failing deduster, which means you won't have to let dusty ass people inside because the vaccum broke.
The real question is why do you have a suit. It will only be necessary to go outside very rarely I would imagine, so the dust becomes less of an issue. Just suck it off anybody coming in and forget about it. You will have to be running some serious hepa/ultraviolet air cleaners anyway, because dust from human skin and abrasion between objects will just build up without limit otherwise. You'll have to ultraviolet the air somehow, or you risk things like legionairs disease, and nitrous oxide buildup.
I would be more worried about wear due to abrasion. Unless parts can be fashioned easily on the moon this could be a serious problem. Perhaps parts exposed to dust could be made out of a polymer that can be melted and remolded, so that the only loss is the small amount of plastic that is actually abraded off, instead of the entire part being ruined.
So suppose the dust is dangerous, which it may be, why are we assuming the people on the moon would ever have to breath it? What you do is design your space suits like the Russians do, they have a hatch built into the back. So when you need to come in from outside, you don't go in an airlock with your dusty suit and then come in the space habitat getting dust all over the inside-- you go in an external room and dock the hatch to the habitat and climb out of the suit. This way the dust can't get in. Mark
I remember that NASA was concerned that the lunar module would sink into the layer of dust, but it didn't.
At the time scientists only had experience with terriestrial dust. Could the surprising supportiveness of the moon dust be at least partially related to the sharper structure of its particles?
I’m old enough to remember 16K of memory being described as “whopping”
To be fair, the Caribs were (at the time of Colombian Contact) engaged in a genocidal war against the Arawaks.
The Arawaks were the former inhabitants of the Greater Antilles, and were (primarily) a fairly peacefull people that utilized a hybrid hunter-gathering/agrarian system of nomadic farming on the islands.
The Caribs were invaders from the mainland, probably from what is modern day Brazil. They moved up the island chain starting in modern day Trinidad, killing and eating the Arawaks.
While not canibals as a primary food source, the Carib religous thoughts about the consumption of an enemy and the rights of war weren't well received by the Europeans, who set about dispatching them with some urgency.
Killfile(TGK)
No trees were killed in the creation of this post. However, many electrons were inconvenienced.
See Mike Combs' space settlement FAQ which says:
Sunlight also drives the life-support system of the habitat, so the day/night cycle can be set to whatever is convenient. Compare this to the moon, where there is 14 days of continuous daylight, and then a 14-day-long night. Here, some alternate energy source would probably have to be used half the time.
Zero G would be a liability if there were no alternative to it. Astronauts experience loss of bone mass and muscle tone after prolonged exposure to weightlessness. But most of a space habitat would be under Earth-normal gravity, although there would be easy access to regions of reduced gravity and zero G (perhaps for personal flight). With planets, on the other hand, you have to take the gravity that's there, and it's often the wrong kind of gravity to keep us healthy. Lunarians or Martians would probably not be able to visit the Earth (nor accelerate at 1 G).
Seastead this.
A moon tourist has spent millions getting there. Surely stumping up for a few worn camera lenses is just going to be hiss...
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Where the backpack mounts, underneath it on the back of the suit, there's a hatch.
Astronaut backs up to the side of the habitat,
removes the backpack or hinges it to one side.
There's a flat oval surface big enough to exit from.
A matching surface on the habitat also opens up.
On it there's a sticky surface like a Post-It note.
Astronaut presses the suit up against that surface, and it seals around the edge.
The sticky surface traps all the dust on the outside of the suit hatch and anything that stuck to the surface gets peeled away along with the sticky layer, out from between the EVA suit and the actual habitat surface.
Think of the old magic trick of slipping a tablecloth out from under the table setting, or of putting down one side of double-sticky tape and then pulling the covering paper out from in between the parts you want to stay in contact.
Then you have a pair of freshly cleaned surfaces stuck together -- astronaut on one side in the EVA suit, and true airlock on the other side in the habitat (yes, you do want a backup door.
Pull the little zip strip all the way around, roll up the membrane with any remaining dust stuck in between two thin layers of clean material.
Astronaut backs into the airlock.
Pull down another clean sheet of sealing material over the opening, with whatever connectors are required for flushing out and cleaning the EVA suit.
Close the portal, leaving the cleaned suit hanging there on the outside of the habitat waiting to be entered next time.
Step through the real airlock door, seal it, wash up, lather-rinse-repeat.
Go into the habitat.
Yes, I take this stuff seriously.
Short of setting up a nice big sprinkler system and freezing the whole area to control the dust, it's going to be a constant issue.
Mars is looking friendlier all the time, as are the Lagrange points.
Maybe the Moon really is for the machines.
Yay. Another +5 Insightful that didn't RTFA. :-\
You seem to have your pressures mixed up. The pressure inside the cabin of an airplane is substantially *higher* then the air pressure outside. (IIRC, the difference is about 15 lbs / in). That would tend to make the cabin door want to burst open, as opposed to staying closed.
Notwithstanding, the article doesn't really discuss the concern of dust getting into the suit. The concern is dust on the suit, which then comes into the lunar facility with the astronaut. The astronaut (lunarnaut?) then takes off his helmet inside the facility and BAM! Lunar dust can now conceivably get into his lungs.
The bigger problem is any lunar dust that makes its way back to the spacecraft. When the craft goes back into space and into zero-g, the particles which were resting on the ground are now floating in the air.
I currently have no clever signature witicism to add here.
I wonder how this compares to Mars dust. Does the wind there grind off the micro-spikes?
Table-ized A.I.
"It won't happen again."
No, it won't. Not to Americans anyway. Not with NASA's already paltry budget being cut to fund more Pentagon spending.
It might be a problem for the Chinese, but as long as we can keep buying cheap Chinese make consumer products at Wal*Mart, America won't give a damn.
Wake up America! Your birthright is being sold to Halliburton. Your schools have been hi-jacked by Christian Fundamentalists who believe that their Creation story ought to be taught in biology classes, and Florida is about to pass a law allowing college professors to be sued for offending Fundamentalist students by ignoring Creationism.
A Republican Congressman, Sennsenbrenner wants to enact criminal penalties -- that is, jail time -- for broadcasters who violate his idea of "decency", and Republican Senator Ted Stevens, wants to expand existing decency laws to cover cable and satellite broadcasts that people can't even see without subscribing.
Your President wants to outlaw medical research because he considers a two-day-old, 16-cell, unimplanted embryo a human life. His executive agencies are quizzing scientists about who they voted for as part of the hiring process, and suppressing research that his corporate backers don't want to see.
Wake up! Science in America is under siege -- not only are we not going back to the Moon, we're headed straight for the Dark Ages.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
Thanks! I'll remember that next time I'm on the moon.
...but is it art?
As soon as they pass legislation to make all the asbestos lawsuits go away, there will be wave after wave of moon dust lawsuits. Betcha they'll claim the stuff just falls out of the sky, and the lawsuits will allege that God is liable.
For protecting the lenses they could use tear-away windshield film.
chown -R us
While all of these are good reasons to establish independent space colonies, here is the #1 reason for landing on a planetary body:
Natural Resources!
Simply put, you need to have "stuff" in order to build anything, and planets like Mars and the Moon have lots of that stuff.
A neat advantage that Mars also offers is that you can start a human civilazation with comparatively fewer resources to start with, as they can draw from the local environment in a much easier fashion than you can by simply sitting in "empty" space, such as LEO. The ISS is a prime example of this, where all of the resources have to be brought up from the Earth in order to sustain human life up there... subject to budget cuts, mismanagement at HQ, and changes of priorities.
That said, you can still obtain some resource from asteroids, but that means you have to run out to them and set up camps on those asteroids to carve up the resources for the space stations you are talking about, or simply start building the settlements themselves right there. You still got planetary settlement then, regardless of where you ship the metal & minerals afterward.
In short, I don't see a way that you can avoid settlements on the Moon or Mars in the next 500-1000 years, and any manufactured worlds (like an O'Neil colony) would have to at least have a symbiotic relationship with miners living on dirt with gravity.
BTW, when you are dealing with agriculture in space, there are a lot of unknowns that will go into the picture. To suggest that there will be no pests or weeds is showing signs of ignorance as to how food is actually grown, as you need a very complex relationship between microorganisms, insects, and multiple species of plants in order to grow healthy crops. Even most farmers take this for granted as they push dirt around, but it is still something that they use to their advantage even here on the Earth. I've had to pull too much sweet corn out of soybean fields to think that weeds are merely noxious plants that God somehow put in there to "torment mankind". This is going to be an issue, however, for any agriculture that takes place off of the Earth.
Also RE: mobile territories--- This is going to be much harder than you think. If you want to have a space colony that can be moved around, it has to be built substantially different from something that is simply built in place to stay there. For a practical current application to compare against, look up or examine the building practices for mobile homes ("manufactured homes" in the current lexicon) vs. on-site constructed homes. Mobile homes have to have steel beams in certain places in order to keep the thing together as it travels down a freeway at 70 mph, and other construction considerations that must be done that keep certain floorplans from being done. Yes, there are some very creative architects that do seeming wonders with manufactured homes, but you can still look at the outside of a house and tell the difference. What make a manufactured home cheap is the economies of scale when they are mass-produced, and not having to haul as much labor on-site. This will not be an option in space for centuries if not for over 1000 years.
If you already have a solid and well established colony on bodies like Mars or the Moon (self-sustaining even), then you will be able to talk about manufactured worlds. Until then, you will have to lift everything from the Earth, which is prohibitively expensive for any very large project, or something that has not risen to the level of being of national importance, Robert Bigelow not withstanding.
What, exactly, does TV censoring have to do with scientific research, pray tell?
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
I can mention "Chinese," "Walmart," "Halliburton," and "Fundamentalists" too.
Christian Fundamentalists and Creationism are not the biggest problems in American schools today. I'm not sure what the biggest problem is (I've begun to realize that my last hypothesis was rather narrowminded), however, I'm starting to think that a deep fear of controversy, and the lack of clear purpose are in a dead heat for it.
Schools seem unwilling to teach about ideas and issues people feel strongly about one way or another. Schools also can't seem to figure out if they exist strictly to do the bidding of the parents, or to have some measure of independence and personal destiny of their own. That ties in with the issue of controversy, though, I suppose. (Then there's also my pet issue with schools: the sink holes that are administrations)
On the issue of broadcast(and cable/satellite) standards, I have to agree with The Wilschon and wonder what this has to do with science, or the Moon. Nevertheless you're talking about one Representative(of 435) and one Senator(of 100). I don't know what kind of support they have for their ideas, but I'm not about to become panicked over the fact that they have them. Senators and Congressmen are allowed to have dumb ideas too... just so long as they don't get the votes to pass them into law.
As to stem cell research(which you can say), like one of the ACs said, he isn't outlawing it, just restricting Federal funding. We're funding it out here in California, though.
Yes, my headline is rather flamish(flemish?), but seriously man, the Dark Ages? If you're going to act as an alarmist, at least come up with some original thoughts.
This is my sig. It's prescription, I swear. I need it for reading things... on the other side of things
There is no excuse for reading the article. The only excuse for even going and loading it, is to try and cut/paste into a posting here, trolling for karma. You should damn well know better by now, actually making intelligent comments based on the articles content is a sure sign of total incompetence with regard to how /. works.
It won't happen again.
It damn well better not, this kind of behaviour can only result in intelligent and <shudder>informed</shudder> commentary. Thats NOT what /. is all about...
Silicosis: the decrease in lung capacity as a result of excessive pressure due to silicone implants.
What do you think the astronauts were breathing in their capsule? Sure , it might not have had the exact mix of gases of earths atmosphere but it mixed with O2 which is the most reactive gas in our atmosphere and if it doesn't react with that I don't think anyone will be losing too much sleep over what happens if you mix it with nitrogen or argon. As for it not being in contact with the lungs , well how do you think the astronauts smelt it without beathing in? Perhaps you should read the article first hmm?
Since there's not much free oxygen on the moon, the dust is likely to contain any number of compounds that will rapidly oxidize on contact with a human-breathable atmosphere.
So all the comments about moon dust smelling "burnt" sound pretty likely. Fire can be seen as an example of a rapid oxidation effect, after all.