(ORDO NEWS) — Sticky and abrasive lunar dust violates the tightness of spacesuits, causes short circuits in equipment, and penetrates into the lungs of people.
To remove it, you can use the same effect, due to which drops of water scatter on the surface of a hot pan.
The surface of the Moon is covered with loose regolith – fine dust, which is much more dangerous than the dust that we are used to on Earth.
Its particles have not been “cut” by wind and water and retain very sharp edges, which makes moon dust a powerful abrasive.
In addition, under the influence of the solar wind, they acquire a weak electrostatic charge and stick to surrounding objects.
For astronauts who have worked on the moon’s surface, lunar dust has proven to be one of the biggest problems. Destroying the hermetic connections of the suits, she disabled several of them.
Dust also penetrated into the manned modules, got into the lungs, causing serious breathing problems. Its charged particles are no less dangerous for electronics.
It is not possible to remove this dust with a brush: such processing only drives the particles deeper into corners, folds and joints.
So now that NASA and its partners are preparing to send people back to the moon, the problem has become urgent.
Scientists from the University of Washington proposed to solve it by removing dust with liquid nitrogen.
Liquid nitrogen is a cryogenic liquid with an extremely low temperature: already at about minus 195 degrees Celsius, it boils.
Once on the much warmer surface of the suit, liquid nitrogen immediately boils, forming small drops that “levitate” above the layer of its own vapor.
This phenomenon can be observed when water drops fall on a hot pan, it is called the Leidenfrost effect . Gradually evaporating, the nitrogen droplets carry away the lunar dust, effectively cleaning the surface.
Jacob Leachman demonstrated this in laboratory experiments with small samples of fabric used in real spacesuits and a simulated lunar dust.
Liquid nitrogen turned out to be a great tool: in a vacuum that simulated real conditions on the moon, it removed more than 98 percent of dust particles.
At the same time, the material withstood up to 75 cycles of contamination and cleaning without damage.
The work was supported by a NASA grant and may indeed find application in future manned missions to our satellite.
However, first, the authors plan to better understand how liquid nitrogen interacts with dust, and to conduct experiments not with 1:6 scale models, but with full-size spacesuits and in conditions close to lunar ones.
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