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

Re:How the hell?

[MattSparkes]

The view part was a joke, but I'm obviously not as funny as I thought I was.

Re:Or do both

[theStorminMormon]

I know this is OT, but it just occurred to me for the first time that if the temperature varies regularly between 100C and -150C, than that must mean that the temperature is regularly around 22C, which is actually quite comfortable. It's just odd to think of the moon having a temperature of 22C at the surface, even if for only a brief time.

Which makes me wonder - if you're standing at a specific place on the moon (or leave a thermometer there) how long would it be in the range of 20 - 25C in its plunge from 100 to -150 (or vice versa).

Like I said - just weird to think of a comfortable temp on the moon even for only a brief period of time.

-stormin