'Shrapnel' risk to future Moon surface missions | Hacker News Reader

'Shrapnel' risk to future Moon surface missions

bbc.co.uk

22 pointsZenst10 comments

Along with the dust. That stuff is apparently nasty. It's glass shards melted around iron blasted by UV rays. So it has ridiculous static cling and the consistency of sandpaper. It levitates up to a kilometer above the surface because of these properties. Dust got in everything, and was an eye and lung irritant on the entire trip back for Apollo missions that included a moonwalk. (If too much gets in the lungs, an astronaut can face iron toxicity.)

NASA research presentation, lists many of the problems: http://isru.msfc.nasa.gov/lib/Documents/BenefWksp2010/presen...

NASA labs are working on dust mitigation, it's probably not an insolvable problem. And some NASA engineers claim you might be able to do cool things with it, like melt it glass roads without additional construction materials. But mitigating all the nasty is still a damn hard engineering problem.

How does the dust levitate? I would think the moon itself needed to have an electric field to make that work.

Funny you should ask, we actually have a Lunar module studying this question right now:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Atmosphere_and_Dust_Envir...

The NASA dust lab slides claimed it levitated right after noting that the dust particles had "charges approaching 10^4" (no units or context provided). I assumed that was related. In hindsight, maybe it isn't?

Apparently, and I'm just learning all this right now, some scientists argue the dust is primarily ejected from the surface during meteor events.

The earliest observations of "levitating" dust were from astronauts who noticed rays of light during/after the lunar sunset, suggesting the sunlight was bouncing off of something in the lunar "atmosphere."

While it is indeed a risk, it's something NASA, and other agencies, have been working and designing suits around for years. Micrometeorites and the like about the size of the objects this article talks about are also prevalent in low earth orbit where the ISS is, and we've not had anyone seriously injured in that environment. In fact, one of the pages on NASA's educational site talks about issues very similar to this [1]. Plus, every space mission has gone with a pretty extensive medical kit [2], and suit repair kit [3], and I'm certain that anyone going to the moon would receive training as to how to clean and dress a wound should someone get peppered from meteorite shrapnel.

[1] http://quest.nasa.gov/space/teachers/suited/9d2micro.html

[2] http://history.nasa.gov/SP-4029/Apollo_18-42_Apollo_Medical_...

[3] http://airandspace.si.edu/events/apollo11/objects/apolloarti...

This seems like a significant problem. One possible solution is to build any future lunar bases underground. That would protect them from most "shrapnel" but there's still the danger of a direct meteor strike, which are much more common on the moon since there's no atmosphere to speak of. You'd have to go pretty deep to be safe from those.

Far enough underground (a few meters) and I think the risk is acceptable. The one in the article made an 18m-diameter crater, so maybe 5-9m deep, but this kind of impact is relatively rare and very unlikely to be in the location of the base.

It's the shrapnel we are worrying about most, not the direct impacts.

I agree underground would be the way, just to curtail radiation, which for a moon base, long-term would be a consideration.

As long as you can see the sun, you need that. And it's got to be thick enough to stop secondary particles, a really thin shield can be worse.

The Apollo missions were timed for the part of the sun's cycle where activity was low, and I've read that their early termination was due in part to the schedule slipping and the last few planned missions edging into the period where the probability of a solar storm killing the astronauts became uncomfortably high.

Also, like a battleship, you'd want any moonbase to be very compartmentalized.

I cam here to say this, It would also save the hassle of having to mine the stuff then bring it up to the surface to convert it into building material..

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