NASA shakes off annoying moon dust with electric current
Moon dust is very clingy and damages hardware and astronauts. NASA has tested a system on the Blue Ghost lander that removes the dust.
Footprints and traces of the Apollo 14 mission's lunar vehicle in the lunar dust.
(Image: NASA)
Dust, very fine, sticky dust everywhere, in the spacesuit, in the habitat, in the vehicle bearings – the regolith on the moon will be the bane of all future moon travelers. The US space agency National Aeronautics And Space Administration (NASA) has now tested a system on the moon that is designed to keep the dust away.
According to NASA, the Electronic Dust Shield (EDS) is designed to remove lunar dust from various surfaces. The system does this quite well, as a test has shown. NASA equipped the Blue Ghost lander, which touched down on the moon at the beginning of March, with the EDS.
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The EDS uses electrodynamic forces to remove lunar dust from a surface. According to NASA, this worked well on the moon. It has published a before-and-after image of a glass surface and a heat radiator, showing that both are largely free of regolith.
Regolith is electrostatic
Regolith is extremely fine, electrostatic dust. It sticks to anything that has a charge. It is very abrasive and damages everything it comes into contact with: spacesuits, vehicles, cameras, devices, but also people's airways and lungs. According to NASA, this makes moon dust "one of the biggest challenges of living and working on the lunar surface".
The problem already arose during the Apollo missions, when there was a lack of experience with it. The astronauts were only on the moon for a few days and the lunar module was abandoned. Nevertheless, the men looked as if they had come out of a coal mine. For longer missions or even colonization of the moon, the problem becomes much greater.
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The EDS consists of an array of small electrodes. A high, varying alternating voltage is applied to these. This process creates a non-uniform electric field, which in turn generates dielectrophoretic forces that remove the dust from the surface. The phase patterns can be used to determine the direction in which the dust is moved.
The positive test was part of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, which serves to prepare for the upcoming Artemis moon missions. It is an important step forward for future long missions to the moon and other celestial bodies, NASA explained.
(wpl)
