Future missions will include a lunar landing, despite the fact that the current mission does not.
A group of students from Washington State University might be able to assist those astronauts in remaining safe once they reach the moon's surface. NASA has already put humans on the moon, and as it gets ready to do so again, it is trying to control a nagging problem.
Ian Wells, a senior at WSU, described the phenomenon as "really, really small, sharp packing peanuts" that "are just attracted to anything that gets onto the surface and are very, very difficult to get off."
Wells is talking about moon dust, which can cause lunar hay fever and is electrically charged, abrasive, and gets everywhere, including astronauts' lungs. Dust from the moon can cover and scratch surfaces, causing damage to equipment and getting into spacesuit seals.
The astronauts on the Apollo missions tried to clean the dust from their spacesuits with a brush, but it didn't work very well. As part of its "BIG Idea Challenge," NASA put out a call for ideas.
Wells and associate professor Jake Leachman of WSU came up with a plan to get rid of the dust.
According to Leachman, "They would collect all of the dust and put it in the lowest part of the floor and just leave it there in one nice spot." "We would watch these liquid nitrogen droplets running around on the floor like water on a hot skillet."
They use a sprayer that looks like the one dermatologists use to put liquid nitrogen in.
"We modified one of those same sprayers and used that initially and then developed that into something we could use as a vacuum," Wells stated. "If you have ever had to have a wart frozen off, we used that."
In a vacuum, the research team discovered that the sprayer removed more than 98% of a moon dust simulant with little harm to spacesuits. Over fifty other teams competed against the WSU team. WSU reached the final seven and ultimately won everything. The Artemis Award and $130,000 for research were awarded to their project.
"Which means that NASA believed that our technology was the most likely to be implemented on these upcoming Artemis missions," Wells stated. "Out of all of those projects, out of all of those teams."
Leachman stated, "Ian demonstrated yet again that WSU's best can compete with and defeat the best at anything the country can produce." We only require those chances to compete and demonstrate that."
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