Slashdot Mirror
Toxic Moondust Bounces Like A Cannonball
Jotii writes "A new NASA article says that moondust fetched to Earth by Apollo 17 is now being studied. From the article: 'Zen-like, he studies the a single mote of dust suspended inside a basketball-sized vacuum chamber for as long as 10 to 12 days.' Moondust is apparently very static, and bounces like cannonballs. Another article from NASA emphasizes the dust's toxicity: 'In some ways, lunar dust resembles the silica dust on Earth that causes silicosis, a serious disease.'"
Have any of the astronauts who were on the moon missions suffered from damage because of this? No doubt they would be exposed to it at some point during the mission...
Yes, TFA mentioned it specifically as quartz.
Ew.
The thing that makes moondust more bothersome that earth quartz dust is that the moondust is charged by UV rays, which causes it to be a lot more sticky than quartz dust is here. Also, the cannonball reference was to the dust flying up off the surface of the moon, which means that the astronauts' spacesuits (and moonbase, once we build one) will be covered from above and below in the stuff. It'll be hard to keep the stuff out if the astronauts come and go often, and once in, it can wreak havoc on their health over the relatively short period of time of a few months.
the article said that moondust becomes so repulsive from being statically charged that it gets launched like cannonballs into the air(possibly). how that translates to 'bouncing' to the submitter i have no idea...
if i'm not immortal, what's the point of living?
...te?
No. Perhaps the whole quote from TFA will make it more clear:
"Mian Abbas did not find that the b single mote of dust or the c single mote of dust were very interesting. But the a single mote of dust, that one was fascinating. Zen-like, he studies the a single mote of dust suspended inside a basketball-sized vacuum chamber for as long as 10 to 12 days."
God, that's funny.
In NASA's defense, "bounces like a cannonball" was the submitter's phrase, not the article's. The article says:
This simile, while still perhaps antiquated, makes a lot more sense.
/still imagining "bouncing" cannonballs...
a ball of steel will actually bounce higher than a ball of rubber, as long as the surface it hits doesn't move or deform. This doesn't describe your average road ("boing" versuse "crunch") but with a giant slab of steel, the cannonball will bounce higher than the rubber.
I am one of many. My idea is not unique, nor do I expect my voice alone to sway you. I speak in a chorus of opinion.
The Apollo astronauts said that they did get exposed to the dust that was on their suits. Once they hopped bck into the ascent stage of the lunar lander, the dust floated everywhere. Once they reconnected with the command module, some of the dust blew in. They breathed the dust throughout the trip home.
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
The Apollo 17 landing film is truly great to watch; the excitement in the astronauts voices shows what it really means for man to land on the moon:
Landing at Taurus-Littrow
Cannonballs bounce nicely when fired from a cannon. I've read descriptions of American Civil War battles that noted how cannonballs gracefully bounced across the battlefield. Although fascinating to watch, they were still extremely dangerous to anyone in their path.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Silicosis is caused by buildup of microscarring in the lungs from internally processing and removing microshards of essentially a silicate solid. Some glassworkers used to get it from grinding glass dry, too, so if you ever drill glass, keep the drill tip and growing hole in the glass wet.
Actually, this is quite some bullshit you are telling :)
...
If there were enough dust to shape the moon round, the apollo lander would have just sunk in
The layer of dust has NOTHING to do with the creation process of the moon but rather with the fact that the lack of athmosphere combined with billions of years of pulverisation of the surface through impacts has created it, plus the lack of the magnetic field has implaneted ions from the solar wind.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
However, as the previous poster mentioned, cannonballs do in fact bounce. However, I doubt that it would be possible to actually see the bouncing cannon ball itself, as it is probably moving at least 300 m/s or so. (I imagine that most of the collisions were highly elastic...allowing a bounce) especially since archeologically recovered canonballs dont have too much damage to them. However, you could probably see the dust rising from where the canon ball is skipping...as well as the effect on any troops in the way. I remember watching a show on the Military Channel where they filmed different types of cannon shot...in slow motion...so you could see how the ball skipped/bounced and lost energy.
I actually read both articles in question and nowhere does it say that moondust is toxic. It does however say that Martian dust can be toxic in the second article. Here are the relevant quotes:
... ...
Quartz, the main cause of silicosis, is not chemically poisonous: "You could eat it and not get sick
Lunar dust, being a compound of silicon as is quartz, is (to our current knowledge) also not poisonous.
Martian dust could be even worse. It's not only a mechanical irritant but also perhaps a chemical poison. Mars is red because its surface is largely composed of iron oxide (rust) and oxides of other minerals. Some scientists suspect that the dusty soil on Mars may be such a strong oxidizer that it burns any organic compound such as plastics, rubber or human skin as viciously as undiluted lye or laundry bleach.
"If you get Martian soil on your skin, it will leave burn marks," believes University of Colorado engineering professor Stein Sture, who studies granular materials like Moon- and Mars-dirt for NASA. Because no soil samples have ever been returned from Mars, "we don't know for sure how strong it is, but it could be pretty vicious."
Moreover, according to data from the Pathfinder mission, Martian dust may also contain trace amounts of toxic metals, including arsenic and hexavalent chromium--a carcinogenic toxic waste featured in the docudrama movie Erin Brockovich (Universal Studios, 2000). That was a surprising finding of a 2002 National Research Council report called Safe on Mars: Precursor Measurements Necessary to Support Human Operations on the Martian Surface.
You can't handle the truth.
Actually, the submitter seems to have mashed up the analogies in TFA to somethng unintellible.
It says "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."
Note that the word "bouncing" does not appear anywhere.