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Magnetic Trunk Could Collect Moon Dust
Matthew Sparkes writes "Astronauts living on the Moon will need lots of water, oxygen and other resources that can be extracted from the lunar soil. Collecting this in a mechanical way could throw up lots of dust that could harm equipment and astronauts health, as well as ruining the view. The answer may be to create a flexible tube with magnetic coils spaced at regular intervals along its length that could suck up the iron-heavy dust. The research was presented on Thursday at the Lunar and Planetary Society Conference in Houston, Texas. Another study suggests burying lunar habitats with packaged moon dust could help regulate their temperature. On the airless Moon, the surface bakes to over 100 Celsius during the day and plunges to a frigid -150 C at night."
Yeah, the carpet's cheap, but shipping rates to the moon are a bit steep.
you could probably throw a hammer and put it into orbit, because the speed of a dropped hammer is actually pretty low
I kind of doubt it. For a circular orbit at a distance of 1km above the lunar surface, the velocity of the hammer would have to be ~1500m/s. That's more than 3,000 mph/5,400 kph. That'd be a hell of a toss.
Unless, of course, my math is wrong, which is possible - but escape velocity with respect to lunar gravity from the surface of the moon is ~2.5km/s, so the number passes the smell test.
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
The problem with moon dust is that it's very abrasive and erodes anything very quickly, another problem is that it's mainly electrically charged.
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I kind of doubt it. For a circular orbit at a distance of 1km above the lunar surface, the velocity of the hammer would have to be ~1500m/s. That's more than 3,000 mph/5,400 kph. That'd be a hell of a toss.
Even if it didn't hit anything there's no way that kind of orbit would be remotley stable. Whilst The Moon does not have any appreciable atmosphere it does have mascons, which means you cannot treat it's gravity as being from a point source so close to the surface.
Ts*(Rs/2D)^.5=Tb
where Ts is the temperature of the sun, Tb the temperature of the body you're concerned with (both temperatures in an absolute scale), Rs is the radius of the sun, and D is the distance to the sun. If you don't know what 2, ^ and .5 mean, please go away.
You'd think temperature would be inversely related to the square of the distance, but temperature based on radiation is a fourth-power function, so when you actually grind through everything, temperature is related to the inverse square root, not the square.
In other words, the Moon should have the same average temperature as the Earth. It's actually a bit lower, because Earth is warmed by radioactive decay in the Earth's interior, greenhouse gases and there's cloud effects and stuff.
The people working on the lunar habitats estimate the temperature would actually be about -22C. That's cold, but stable. Designing equipment to keep the temperature livable with the outside being a constant -22C is far easier than trying to deal with the wild fluctuations.
BTW: If you want to have some fun, assume that temperature rises on Pluto and Titan are the result of changes in solar output that are causing global warming on Earth. Plug in the numbers and ask what increase in solar temperature would correspond to that -- and then ask what the change in Earth temperature would be. Oopsie.
This sig seemed like a good idea at the time....
Or...
/ 2006-12-18-why-go.html
We could not go to the moon. Maybe focus on... problems on earth? Just a thought...
This cartoon illustrates the complete idiocy of that line of reasoning:
http://www.wellingtongrey.net/miscellanea/archive
read it and then slink away in embarrassment over your shortsighted, ultimately suicidal philosophy. People who think the way you do are basically just selfish. You demand to be made comfortable even though it means the death of your species in the long run. Do us all a favor and just DIAF. The rest of us want a brighter future.