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."

Comments

And 500,000 years ago...

[Farmer Tim]

We could not go to the savannah. Maybe focus on... problems up in the trees? Just a thought...

I can't imagine wanting to be anywhere that has a seasonal variation, large predators, and no physical contact with other primates. But really... I have never been very likely to evolve.

Never forget that the comfortable life you enjoy is possible because of the risks others have taken in the past.

Re:How the hell?

[oni]

dust on the moon falls back to the ground at the same speed as a dropped hammer

yes but you're missing an important part - the moon's gravity is so weak, you could probably throw a hammer and put it into orbit, because the speed of a dropped hammer is actually pretty low.

So the concern is that some mechanical process, maybe a fast spinning wheel or maybe the use of explosives, will actually put dust grains into orbit. It turns out, the moon already has a very thin atmosphere:

http://zebu.uoregon.edu/~soper/Moon/atmosphere.htm l

composed of a few atoms that are basically in orbit. So the point is, it is possible to create a dust atmosphere on the moon. We want to be careful when we start mining or whatever. We don't want to make that atmosphere significantly worse, because that dust will gum up machines.

Don't Blow the Dust

[Doc Ruby]

The lunar surface dust holds the records of millions, billions of years of impacts and other events at the lunar surface. Which in turn are records of object trajectories through the solar system, which leave fingerprints of their momentum in the 3D surface.

We certainly should be harvesting as much of the local resources for exploration and human colonization. But we should do as much as we can with current science and technology (which is quite a lot) to read those records and preserve their info before destroying them.

The Moon is a treasure among resources available to humans. Primarily for science, especially before we destroy the evidence. The mining and exploitation can wait a bit longer. That way, we can have both.

Re:Don't Blow the Dust

[PitaBred]

Records of what, meteorite impacts? That have obscured other meteorite impacts? That as a whole, over the surface of the moon, just created a pretty much even distribution of impacts, so much so that studying one location is the same as studying almost any other location, not to mention that this is of very limited value anyway? Take a statistics course, kid.