NASA experiment on Blue Ghost demonstrates the ability to repel the Moon’s abrasive dust
Click for original blink movie.
In a press release yesterday, NASA revealed that one of its technology experiments on Firefly’s Blue Ghost lunar lander successfully demonstrated the ability to repel the Moon’s abrasive dust from the surfaces of various materials.
Lunar dust is extremely abrasive and electrostatic, which means it clings to anything that carries a charge. It can damage everything from spacesuits and hardware to human lungs, making lunar dust one of the most challenging features of living and working on the lunar surface. The EDS technology uses electrodynamic forces to lift and remove the lunar dust from its surfaces. The “before” image highlights the glass and thermal radiator surfaces covered in a layer of regolith, while the “after” image reveals the results following EDS activation. Dust was removed from both surfaces, proving the technology’s effectiveness in mitigating dust accumulation.
The images to the right, taken from a blink movie showing the change after the EDS technology was used, suggest that though this technology does work, it is not yet wholly successful in some cases. The thermal radiator was not cleared entirely of dust. More engineering research will be necessary, both on the Moon and here on Earth.
Nonetheless, this success is important and a major step forward for future exploration of the Moon, Mars, and the asteroids. In all these places dust is going to pose a major problem for equipment and spacesuits. New techniques must be developed to clean the dust away, since traditional Earth-based cleaning methods using water will not be available.
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Click for original blink movie.
In a press release yesterday, NASA revealed that one of its technology experiments on Firefly’s Blue Ghost lunar lander successfully demonstrated the ability to repel the Moon’s abrasive dust from the surfaces of various materials.
Lunar dust is extremely abrasive and electrostatic, which means it clings to anything that carries a charge. It can damage everything from spacesuits and hardware to human lungs, making lunar dust one of the most challenging features of living and working on the lunar surface. The EDS technology uses electrodynamic forces to lift and remove the lunar dust from its surfaces. The “before” image highlights the glass and thermal radiator surfaces covered in a layer of regolith, while the “after” image reveals the results following EDS activation. Dust was removed from both surfaces, proving the technology’s effectiveness in mitigating dust accumulation.
The images to the right, taken from a blink movie showing the change after the EDS technology was used, suggest that though this technology does work, it is not yet wholly successful in some cases. The thermal radiator was not cleared entirely of dust. More engineering research will be necessary, both on the Moon and here on Earth.
Nonetheless, this success is important and a major step forward for future exploration of the Moon, Mars, and the asteroids. In all these places dust is going to pose a major problem for equipment and spacesuits. New techniques must be developed to clean the dust away, since traditional Earth-based cleaning methods using water will not be available.
Readers!
My annual February birthday fund-raising drive for Behind the Black is now over. Thank you to everyone who donated or subscribed. While not a record-setter, the donations were more than sufficient and slightly above average.
As I have said many times before, I can’t express what it means to me to get such support, especially as no one is required to pay anything to read my work. Thank you all again!
For those readers who like my work here at Behind the Black and haven't contributed so far, please consider donating or subscribing. My analysis of space, politics, and culture, taken from the perspective of an historian, is almost always on the money and ahead of the game. For example, in 2020 I correctly predicted that the COVID panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Every one of those 2020 conclusions has turned out right.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation or subscription:
4. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
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You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.
“New techniques must be developed to clean the dust away, since traditional Earth-based cleaning methods using water will not be available”
Other methods most widely available in common use:
1- Compressed air, blows dust off but also adds more static charge. in limited supply where there’s no atmosphere.
2- anti-static spray eliminating static charge. Works great like compressed air, eliminating problem for a short time but in limited supply.
3- windshield wiper style of brush with anti-static properties. Mechanically driven, effective but power consuming and prone to failure. Tends to scratch surface.
4- A strong electrostatic field/ filter that magnetically collects the fugitive dust before it reaches components. Must have the ability to extend itself away from components before power is turned off for self cleaning.
5- NASA’s Electrodynamic Dust Shield (EDS)
An electrically induced repulsive force (similar to a degaussing field used in ships and submarines that prevents MAD magnetic anomaly detection that enemy mine’s can detect and lock onto). Will repel charged dust, but may collect Ferris materials/particles with the opposite charge.
Personally the best alternative to me, after prevention methods, is to use what works best here on earth. Take a bath.
A decontamination section that you walk through before the habitation section will be necessary for long-term sustainability. Moon buggies and tools only used outside will remain out in the garage, humans and their dust will return through a decontamination chamber involving pressure spray (car wash…) or immersion in water (Hot tub) which is non-toxic and will remove all static charges, neutralize contaminants, and wash away offending particles to be collected in a common water filter.
In near vacuum conditions, heat lamps will quickly boil residual water away (which is captured and recycled) before astronaut enters airlock with all personal gear neutralized/cleansed of dust.
Max: You‘re right; the simplest solution is usually the correct one. A simple water bath will effectively clean off nearly all of the dust. This approach, combined with extensive paving of the surrounding area, should make the problem manageable.
Respectfully disagree, guys. The reason dust is sticking is due to electrostatic attraction. Blowing and washing the stuff off consumes gas and water, unsustainable in the long run. Paving or sintering the surrounding area is similarly bad, though without the long term consumable penalty. An electrostatic approach to electrostatic sticky stuff, OTOH, might (and should) work nicely, but needs some testing. Cheers –
It seems pretty clear that standard lunar hab architecture needs to incorporate something analogous to the venerable feature of a “mud room” as found in most northern latitude houses – a place where one can leave rain or snow boots and hang up raincoats, umbrellas, parkas, scarves and other inclement weather outerwear before entering the living area proper.
What should go on in a lunar mud room by way of cleaning, though, is far from clear. Any sort of full-immersion water bath for fabric-covered EVA suits, for example, would cause the water, as it entered the interstices between fabric threads, to carry any suitably small regolith particles with it. This would allow said particles, which are wickedly sharp, a fine opportunity to slice at the fabric. Once the water, and any detergent or other surfactant mixed with the water, flowed out again, the razor-blade-ish regolith particles would simply get a second slice at the fabric. Pressure washing instead of immersion would, in all likelihood, be even worse.
Substituting any sort of dry process such as external blowing or sucking of ambient air could also be problematical. The best such would likely be some form of outward-only blowing process done with compressed gas being introduced from within the suit into the space between its outermost and next-outermost layers so that regolith on the former would be blown straight away, minimizing, but probably not eliminating, fabric damage. There would, in any case, always be fabric damage from regolith working away at the suit when in field use between cleanings.
If fabric-based EVA suits are to be used, their outer layers should probably be designed as periodically replaceable over-garments. This, needless to say, also generates a potentially sizable recycling problem.
Perhaps the best long-term solution will be to make planetary surface EVA suits for both the Moon and Mars with only smooth metallic and/or composite external surfaces. That would provide a best-case situation in which to apply the electrostatic cleaning technology recently tested on Blue Ghost. But any sort of dirty-environment EVA suit is going to be a considerable engineering challenge.
agimarc,
Gas and fluid recycling is going to be necessary in lunar living quarters for all sorts of reasons beyond the problematical “laundering” of EVA suits. So simply adding that incremental burden is not a show-stopper per se.
But I’m particularly curious as to why you think paving/sintering of areas around lunar habs would be a problem. Seems more like an at least partial solution to regolith management to me.
One advantage of the Starship HLS over Blue Moon’s (or indeed the Chinese lander) is that it has an actual honest-to-gosh airlock — *two* airlocks, in fact. A helpful development if you mean to make your Starship your de facto “hab” for a mission.
But what mechanisms will SpaceX incorporate into those airlocks for dust mitigation? Will the airlocks themselves amount to a kind of mudroom, or might they use some kind of rooms in the deck above to further restrict the presence of regolith dust into the ship? We have heard nothing about this, but I have heard it is something they are concerned about.
But inevitably. this is going to be an evolving response over time.