GOLDEN, Colorado-The Moon is dusty, grimy, and potentially hazardous to your health.
Ultra-tiny dust grains can gum up the works of vital hardware on the Moon. And there's also a possible risk to health from gulping in the lunar dust-a toxicological twist to "bad Moon rising."
Thanks to the Apollo program there's firsthand knowledge about the Moon being a Disneyland of dust.
Moonwalkers were covered from helmet to boot with lunar dust. Also tagged as the "dirty dozen," astronauts on the various Apollo missions worked long hours in the lunar environment, setting up science equipment and collectively bagged 840 pounds (382 kilograms) of rock and other surface material for shipment back to Earth.
As NASA planners gear up to replant astronauts on the lunar surface before 2020, scientists and engineers are grappling with how best to certify a safe and productive stay for 21st-century moonwalkers.
Mining specialists, researchers, entrepreneurs, and NASA managers took part in the eighth Space Resources Roundtable, held here Oct. 31-Nov. 2 at the Colorado School of Mines and in collaboration with the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas.
Sticky issue
"First and foremost is just the fact that the dust just sticks to everything," said Jasper Halekas, a research physicist at University of California, Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory in Berkeley, California.
From gauge dials, helmet sun shades to spacesuits and tools, the "stick-to-itness" of dust during the Apollo missions proved to be a noteworthy problem, Halekas reported. Most amusingly, he added, even the vacuum cleaner that was designed to clean off the dust clogged down and jammed.
Halekas recounted a technical debrief by Apollo 17's Gene Cernan after his 1972 Moon voyage.
Cernan said that "one of the most aggravating, restricting facets of lunar surface exploration is the dust and its adherence to everything no matter what kind ... and its restrictive friction-like action to everything it gets on." The astronaut added: "You have to live with it but you're continually fighting the dust problem both outside and inside the spacecraft."
Electrically active
Although the lunar environment is often considered to be essentially static, Halekas and his fellow researchers reported at the workshop that, in fact, it is very electrically active.
The surface of the Moon charges in response to currents incident on its surface, and is exposed to a variety of different charging environments during its orbit around the Earth. Those charging currents span several orders of magnitude, he said.
Dust adhesion is likely increased by the angular barbed shapes of lunar dust, found to quickly and effectively coat all surfaces it comes into contact with. Additionally, that clinging is possibly due to electrostatic charging, Halekas explained.
"I think it would behoove us to understand the lunar dust plasma environment as well as possible before we try to come up with detailed dust mitigation strategies," Halekas told SPACE.com. "This would mean characterizing the dust, electric fields and plasma around the Moon and understanding how they interact."
Halekas said that he advocates science experiments either in lunar orbit or on the Moon's surface-preferably both-in order to gauge the problem.
"At this point, we know so little about the near-surface electrodynamic environment and its effect on dust that we can't do much more than conjecture and try to predict the most likely scenario," Halekas said.
Just knowing that the dust is there, Halekas added, tells us that we need to deal with it. "But without more detailed knowledge than we currently have, I think we're handicapped in coming up with effective mitigation strategies."
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