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Lunar Dustbusters
Maggie McKee writes "Moon dust could be a source of oxygen and metals. But moon dust could also lodge in astronauts' lungs, possibly triggering long-term health effects. During the relatively short Apollo Moon landing missions nearly 40 years ago, astronauts reported difficulty breathing. So now, before astronauts return to the moon in 2020, NASA is working on a number of ways to reduce the amount of lunar dust astronauts are exposed to — from simple grates on the floor to magnetic wands and giant lint rollers."
Why is Lunar dust so different than "normal" dust and/or sand that we breathe and/or eat every day?
"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote."
But moon dust could also lodge in astronauts' lungs, possibly triggering long-term health effects.
Possibly? Is there not a consensus that this is likely to cause disease like silicosis?
giant lint rollers
You have to be F***ing kidding.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
That lunar dust is "not hazardous", read this: MICRO-MORPHOLOGY AND TOXICOLOGICAL EFFECTS OF LUNAR DUST The part about "glass shards" really brings the "point" home.
I've got your sig, right here.
I bet 3M can do a better job with this than anyone. Make a non-stick so the dust won't carry.
The creator of this post (Jacob Smith) hereby releases it, and all of his other posts, into the public domain.
Hello, iRobot? Yeah I'd like to place an order for 1 million Roombas. And uhhh, what kind of delivery charge is there for the Moon?
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
This looks like a nice stuff to breathe.
The iRobot Moonba
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
Finally a use for Ionic Breezes!
This is not a showstopper.
Additionally, shooting these "Astronauts" into space isn't getting us anywhere.
We need to send Norm Abrams. And hell, send some of them other remodeling people. Send some of those makeover people. Send Flav, Vern, and Janice Dickenson and some other b/c listers, sell the rights and the whole damn thing is self financing.
Technology -- No Place For Wimps! Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia Chatroom -- http://www.wemissjerry.org
Just get UPS to bring them to Florida, they can take it from there.
Technology -- No Place For Wimps! Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia Chatroom -- http://www.wemissjerry.org
Wouldn't it be more prudent to just take 1 billion of those dollars and spend it looking for near earth asteroids.
You could additionaly spray them off with air/nitrogen/whatever other gas, that would help scatter those particles that were stuck to the suits, the could even do this before getting back into the landing module.
Much like the hose we used to have at the ranch house, you wash the mud off of your shoes before coming into the house, then left your shoes just inside the door.
Less look fast, more go fast.
Lets say you spend hours/days in a tin can with very little room (and head-room) while your head is tethered to the wall and inside a fish bowl. Now lets try and not only sleep in that fish bowl, but carry out day-to-day activities. I think I do see a problem.
Demented But Determined.
Well, that's 40 seconds of my life I'll never get back.
653899 - Another prime Slashdot UID
Right, but the astronauts could take the dust inside their Lander and in the Apollo capsule, on their suits or shoes, where they breath normally :)
I'm thinking they could insert their helmet into the air lock, and crawl out. That way, they'd only need to worry about dust that gathered on the helmet. But I suppose it would be expensive/impossible to design and make a one piece suit.
How did this get modded insightful? The guy totally missed the point. He's not saying that they remain tethered for the entirety of the journey, only that they should remain tethered while in the lunar lander.
Got Shadowrun? Awakened Worlds
But moon dust could also lodge in astronauts' lungs, possibly triggering long-term health effects.
Well, then it's good that there's no air on the Moon, so they'll asphyxiate long before the dust can cause any problems. :)
reduce the amount of lunar dust
Previously astronauts were men, which are all pigs, as is well known. Now the solution is obvious. Send a woman to every moon mission and she certainly won't tolerate dust, moon or other kind, to accumulate in the living quarters, solving the problem. I can already hear her... "Commander! If I've told you once I've told you a thousand times. CLEAN YOUR FEET before coming in!"
Just...let's hope they don't try to open the windows when dusting.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
So Woot finally has a purpose?
You should read the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal. Sleeping in the suits was found to be very uncomfortable, even for the short missions (Apollo 11-14). Even then they had to take their helmets off to eat and drink.
Lunar dust is so fine it sticks to everything and gets into everything. Even Armstrong and Aldrin, who were only out for just over two hours, were absolutey covered with the stuff.
The longer missions being planned for the future will need to have a proper airlock area where the crews can strip down to their skin, shower, and only then enter the living area. The airlock would also be used to maintain suit fabric and seals, which are the real problem IMO because the dust is so abrasive.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
the astronauts are forced to enter the landing vehicle, flood the airlock with air and pressurize it, have them remain in their suits and strap in securely as the airlock de-pressurizes and the vacuum sucks that dust out before it can get inside, minus the tiny bits that'd come in stuck to the bottom of astro-boots or in creases of astro-suits. It'd take a long time for silicosis or lung/tissue damage from micro-glass shards to actually occur. I'd think this type of protocol would make this a non-issue, however, even microscopic things can cause problems in small numbers if left unattended for long periods of time. It'll take diligence and somethign better than a fucking lint-roller for protection to make this completely null and void.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
The solution is simple, just send an advance party of experienced house cleaners to clean the surface up a litte. They can send the full dust bags into moon orbit using little mini-thrusters. This also provides much-needed employment for the badly paid.
I would have suggested a fleet of Roomba carrrying vessels but they might take over the moon and clain it for the Roomba republic.
I hope this comment is helpful for the many valuable people working on this problem.
On y va, qui mal y pense!
During the relatively short Apollo Moon landing missions nearly 40 years ago, astronauts reported difficulty breathing.
And that is how we discovered that the Moon doesn't have an atmosphere...
There should be a huge push to really advance the robotics technology and deploy these throughout the known galaxy. But of course the stupid humans would rather blow there time, $$ and technology to fight wars and kill each other. Sigh....almost makes one ashamed to be human. Almost?
The clear solution is to use massive lasers to glass the entire surface of the moon over.
This would have the added benefit of increasing it's reflective properties resulting in lower electricity costs for street lighting and fewer violent crimes at night as well as reducing overall greenhouse emissions and helping to reverse global warming. Oh and it would help stop terrorists.
Lasers... Is there anything they can't do?
This is easily resolved by shipping the Moon units without astronauts.
...cos my first thought on seeing the headline was
"People on airless planet report problems breathing"
which doesn't really seem to be pushing back the frontiers of human knowledge....
It's not like we're going to go back up there, hang out for a couple of hours, then take off again (that is -so- 60's!).
If you want to do anything long-term up there, you need to solve the dust problem in a way that that allows the astronauts to live and work effectively for extended periods. What the OP recommends does not meet those criteria...
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
A recent book (reviewed here) denounces the entire concept of manned spaceflight as the useless "madness" of boys who never outgrew childish games. Milder critics of the space program ask why we should send humans into space when automated probes are supposedly more useful for their price. Not too long ago, Discover Magazine had a cover article asking whether, maybe, space is so innately dangerous (with all that radiation) that we should avoid going back until we have robots or gengineered humans (!) able to cope with it. Others such as Vox Day, hater of humanity, begin using their word processors to declare that "science has outlived its usefulness to Mankind." And here, we have NASA saying hold everything; we're afraid of the dust.
(An excerpt from the book:
"If there is a lesson to be learned, it is in the futility of seeking fulfillment in outer space. We need to judge ourselves by who we are, not by where we go... Hubris took America to the Moon, a barren, soulless place where humans do not belong... If the voyage has had any positive benefit at all, it has reminded us that everything that is good reside on Earth.")
"We're not worthy, it's not safe, nothing we've ever done is worthwhile." I see this line of thinking as suicidal for the human race. If transhumanism is a supposedly unrealistic fantasy of doing more things than have ever been done before, then shall we call this sentiment "subhumanism," the desire for people to set their sights below what's been accomplished already?
Revive the Constitution.
We may not have (much) water on the moon, but what we bring with us we can be recycled, and we do have gravity.
"Fix it? It has been disintegrated, by definition it cannot be fixed!" - Gru in Despicable Me.
The most obvious solution, given how pervasive and abrasive the moon dust is, is to design space suits like snake skins where you simply shed the outer layer in the airlock and dump it outside onto the moon leaving the inner suit dust free for you to procede into the living area and change into uniform.
You'd need some clever way of unpeeling the skin from the suit without spreading the dust everywhere but I'm sure that's perfectly possible.
Why not in the air lock have air nossles that spray down the astronauts suits as they come in? Similar to the ones in hosiptals and such. It would spray all the dust off and stay in that one room (or most of it).
Bite my shiny metal ass.
Silly question perhaps, but how are they able to breath the dust? Aren't they in a contained suit since there is no atmosphere on the moon or is this from dust built up on the suit and inhaled while they're taking the suit off?
Magnetic dust?
So putting someone with heavy lung contamination into an MRI machine will result in a perforated astronaut?
ObMovieReference: Just like what Magneto did to that security guard in X2?
I for one welcome our new giant lint rollerlords.
Have you read my journal today?
If you've ever had one of those sticky rubbery toys that you fling at a wall and it slowly climbs down, you'll know the tacky surface picks up all sorts of dust and crap and you have to wash it with soap to clean them. Just spray the spacesuits with this stuff and the dust will stick to it safely... :-)
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
I went to a lunch presentation on returning to the moon. One of the ideas for longer term use like colonization was to make roads by microwaving the regolith.
The iron melts into a continuous crust instead of being so abrasive and sharp
Yet another problem that would be completely solved if we'd just listen to the fine folks at alt.chrome.the.moon.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
chest congestion is the least of your problems if you're "breathing" dust on the surface of the moon? IANAA (I am not an astronaut) but maybe they could use the "vacuum" to loose the dust, or use an Andromeda Strainer.
0x7279727972797279
My dad used to work at a company on Long Island that had a spacesuit on display in the hallways, back in the mid-80's. I saw it on many a company tour.
:-)
When I later joined as a summer intern, I noticed that the suit was no longer on display; it was missing from the building entirely. I found out that NASA had given the suit, but took it back once they realized that they had never cleaned the space dust off the suit.
Maybe my exposure is why I have asthma.
Let's look at the guinea pigs we sent to the moon:
Still kicking:
Buzz Aldrin is still alive. He's 77.
Neil Armstrong is still alive. He's 76.
Alan Bean is still alive. 75.
Edgar Mitchell. 77 and counting.
David Scott. 75 and counting.
John Young, 77.
Charles Duke, 72.
Eugene Cernan, 73.
Harrison Schmidt, 73.
Died, accident:
Pete Conrad died in 1999 at age 69. (Accident, crash)
Died, disease
Alan Shephard died at age 75 from leukemia.
James Irwin in 1991 at age 61. (Heart failure, which may have been a preexisting condition and caused him to suffer a heart attack during Apollo 15)
Not bad, actually. They should be healthier than the normal person, sure, but I don't see rampant cancer, lung or cardiovascular disease running roughshod over the ranks of the men who've been on the moon.
I call Bullshit.
Get off my lawn.
"returns to the moon"???
Another idea to deal with the dust is to fuse the surface around the habitat. The dust doesn't migrate like it does here on earth because there isn't an atmosphere to waft it. You knock dust loose on the moon, it plummets directly to the ground like a bowling ball. So the idea is to melt the regolith around the habitat so that most of the dust is shed just walking across a paved surface to the habitat. It won't get rid of all the mess, but it'll cut it down.
The Apollo 12 astronauts dealt with the problem in an ad-hoc, but effective, fashion. Gordon, the command module pilot, wouldn't let Bean and Conrad back in until they stripped to buck naked because he didn't want them gunging up their ride home. As they were firing up the engine to leave lunar orbit, one of them joked that if the engine failed, the recovery crew would be wondering why a couple of the astronauts were naked.
There's no air on the moon! AMIRITE???
they should remain tethered while in the lunar lander
You do realise that that's going to be for a few days at least, right?
Besides which, I think you're thinking far too small scale and short term - what about if/when we finally establish a colony on the Moon, and people are there for months at a time?
It's official. Most of you are morons.
>So now, before astronauts return to the moon in 2020
oh come on. Why are we wasting money preparing for a project we know is going to get canceled? I mean... who really thinks that when it comes time to actually send someone, and we need to actually pay for it, that it's not going to get canceled? This is a lot of nonsense about one politician trying to take credit for an ambitious program and forcing another future politician to suffer from its eventual failure.
Since the space suit is already designed to handle a vacuum, why not make it capable of 'docking' with an airlock so the suit never comes inside, and the astronaut just climbs in and out of it at his or her own leisure?
It's been a long time.
You make a good point I hadn't thought of before. If this stuff is both physically abraisive and chemically active, it might be a constant struggle to keep it outside and the air inside.
Lime Kilns and recausticizing plants in paper mills are usually just slathered in lime dust, which turns into a strong base when exposed to moisture, and eats away at everything. If we can design a recaust plant that you could eat a meal in without dying violently, that would be good practice for a long-term moon base.
It's been a long time.