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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.'"
I for one welcome our statically bouncing moondust neighbours.
whee, it's flubber! i bet those scientists had lots of fun. that is a long time for somehing to bounce, but i would imagine in a vacuum with no air resistance any bouncy ball would go on for a long time
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...
Silica poisoning is something people who work with ceramics extensively occasionally get..... If you're working with the stuff while it's dry on a regular basis, you should probably wear a dust mask.
Don't know if we've ever brought back enough dust to actually cause anyone harm.
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If this dust bounces like canonballs, then the NBA will be ALL OVER toxic moondust basketballs.
I think that if this study proves that moondust can be dangerous, any astronauts stationed to a moonbase should probably just stay inside. Or at least, cover their mouths while they're roaming around outside. No sense in risking your health by walking around outside on the moon without any kind of protection for your lungs.
Who the hell wants a big bouncing ball of toxic dust for X-mas?
I'd be torn. Cool space dust... or the Xbox 360 that I asked for. Descisions, descisions!
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Yeah.
Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicolunarconiosis.
Why not just use static to get the dust off too?
You could simply use static emitters in the lunar module to trap dust, just like a 5 billion duster.
Cheaper alternative, stick a sign on the door that says: "Please remove your shoes before entering lunar lander."
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That reminds me of one of my favorite Douglas Adams quotes:
"The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't."
Don't cannonballs bounce similarly to how lead balloons fly...?
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Go with the moon dust. After the PS3 and Revolution come out, the moon dust will still be cool. ;-)
Last time I tried to bounce a cannonball I was thrown off the team.
ogglelog
Um... Does anyone know the chemical composition of this dust? How different is it from the stuff you'd find on Earth, chemically speaking? I don't care what it does, I care what makes it up.
On a different note now, silica dust seems to me like it'd be basically glass or ceramic powder, and it makes intuitive sense that powdered glass would be very bad for the lungs. But couldn't any finely divided dust of materials with similar properties to silica be expected to cause a similar condition if inhaled over time? I'm thinking steel dust or granite powder, or something like that. It's not like asbestos, where the "toxicity" is really "carcinogenicity."
In fact, calling the dust "toxic" makes it out to be a poison, when it's really more of a severe and persistent irritant. To call this or asbestos toxic seems a bit misleading and sensational--not to understate the dangers, but you want people to understand why things are dangerous, and in what way. Dimethyl mercury is toxic by contact; phosgene is toxic by inhalation; I think that both do more than just irritate.
Are all our moondust belong to them?
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
Wow... the sound of that is something quite atrocious.
"A new NASA article says that moondust fetched to Earth by Apollo 17 is now being studied. [...]"
Well, all I can say is, it's about time!
WTF is this article about? Do they bounce or not? I think "bounce like cannonballs" was just a very poor attempt at sarcasm by the scientist. I don't think there's any story here at all really. But I guess that's why I read it first on Slashdot...
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."
Of course, you can say it backwards, which is sisoinocranulociliscipocsorcimartluonomuenp, but that's going a bit too far, don't you think?
close your eyes and imagine a speck of dust bouncing like a cannonball...
i understand the instinct that drives scientists to say things like it "bounces like cannonballs" for the sake of us average joes who don't talk in kilocuries and attonewtons and femtofarads
however i would respectfully request that scientists attempting to talk in layman terms update their terminology to something after the civil war, as i don't think many of us average joes have seen any cannonballs bouncing around anywhere lately
i mean what is "bounces like cannonballs" supposed to mean? the best mental image i can come up with is a bouncing bowling ball... which doesn't really bounce- is that the point? then why not just say "it doesn't bounce"
does it make sense to say "the car drove off the highway at 80 mph and bounced off the tree like a cannonball" unless you're trying to write colorful fiction?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I think the poster has grasped the less than clear point that 'bouncing like cannonballs' means not bouncing at all. Perhaps 'bounces like watermelons' would have been better, but then again 'melons' and 'bouncing' in the same sentence may have distracted some of our younger readers...
On the same NASA site, there's an article about the toxicity of moondust. It appears that because of its small particle size (10 microns), the moondust gets embedded into lungs, just like quartz used to do in the old mining days, causing silicosis.t inhale.htmn mower.htm
The astronauts did inhale some of the moondust, with effects similar to a hay fever.
Not only that, but the dust is statically charged because of the Sun and lack of humidity, so it will stick to just about anything, causing abrasion.
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2005/22apr_don
There are plans to build a "microwave lunar lawn mower" that will melt the dust into something useful and stop it from bouncing.
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2005/09nov_law
Saying that moon-dust is toxic because it could cause silicosis is like saying water is toxic becuase you can drown in it.
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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
Moondust bounces high
Suspended in emptiness
A scientist coughs
Cannonballs bounced quite far after being fired across the battlefield. It was this bouncing low to the ground that made them so effective (deadly), especially againts solidiers in column.
"individual dust grains returned by Apollo 17 astronauts in 1972 and the Russian Luna-24 sample-return spacecraft that landed on the Moon in 1976"
Another government program that doesn't understand the concept of turnaround time. Demand efficiency, or farm it out to the free market!
(Ha ha, only serious.)
The impacts of all the meteorites and otherstuff that's hitting that atmospherically unshielded rockball all the time, I think.
I'm no astrophysics buff, but AFAIK the moon's spherical nature holds the key: Most such objects are giant clouds of dust and rocks that collided into a single body at their center of gravity (google for "accretion disc/k"). There can be enough heat (impacts, etc.) involved to melt that ball of dust'n'rubble, if cooled again, they become rather uniform (many (?) Planets). The Moon is a bit of an exception, since it hasn't formed from stellar dust, but after a big impact to earth. Still there was enough dust involved to cover the moon up to a rather spherical shape :-)
In short: rocks are rocks, but on the moon they're rare, because the dust wasn't melted into them.
I don't know what this story is about, but I know the next song I write is bound to have the line "Toxic Moondust Bounces Like A Cannonball." Thanks, and pass the bong, taco.
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?
As I said, I may be wrong, but sinking into dust is bullshit as well :) It would be highly compressed under it's own weight, so you can't sink in, just like you don't sink in the desert, you'll need quicksand for that.
Yeah, and by the time you finish trying to pronounce those long words, if you aren't dead yet because of the inhaled silica dust, you'll be surely asphyxiated to death, trying to say it without stopping to catch breath.
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actually, the dust got in through their boots aswell. Apparently the dust is so fine it can get through "air tight" spaces.
Obviously the moondust is detrimental to the IQ as well as the lungs.
Can you just imagine how long they stared at the CONTAINER zen-like before opening it? Must have been a LOT longer than 10 days, huh?
As has been pointed out in a previous post, "calling moondust toxic because it can cause silicosis is like calling water toxic because you can drown in it." Moondust, it seems clear, also does not "bounce like a cannonball." Nothing bounces like a cannonball, just like nothing "oscillates like a cloud," or "crows like a football." In the light of these observations, I'm not quite convinced that it really is dust, or that it comes from the moon. Anyway, I'd like to nominate this for the Worst Headline 2005 Award.
No one actually knows how the moon formed, the whole huge impact theory is still only a best guess.
If it was that theory that formed it then the moon will have been fairly molten at the time which is how it will have shaped itself in to a sphere as all large fluid masses do.
As for the dust. Lots of impacts + Total lack of water + No wind to even clear the dust in to dunes = Nice layer of dust across the whole surface. The actual layer of dust though is only a few centimeters deep and not really enough to highly compress it.
Now I don't feel so bad about how long it takes me to get around to finishing projects.
Toxic Moondust Bounces Like A Cannonball
Cannonballs bounce?
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
"... freebasing ground-up moon rocks. And that just gets me to normal!"
All things being equal, a metal ball will bounce higher than a rubber one because the compression snap ends up being of greater energy... er... after dented when the bounce is initiated, the metal ball returns to its original shape faster, propelling it higher than a similar rubber ball. I figured the same would apply to cannon balls since they are metal (aren't they?)... I just don't get it... is it because cannon balls are so heavy that it appears all /.ers are in agreement that they don't bounce? Why don't they bounce?
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There was a previous slashdot article on the problem, where NASA had proposed microwaving the surface area of the Moon for a future space colony, in order to
prevent the dust from getting everywhere.
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Sorry, looks like I forgot to actually read the preview before I submitted it.
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Cannonballs bounce when they've been fired. Once they hit the ground, they tend to be moving so fast that they can still fly off in a near random direction, causing even more damage. So.. yeah.. Bricks don't hang in the sky, but cannonballs definitely bounce.