The Smell of Moondust

[zavvy]

<b>The Smell of Moondust</b><br /><br />LINK<br /><br />Moondust. "I wish I could send you some," says Apollo 17 astronaut Gene Cernan. Just a thimbleful scooped fresh off the lunar surface. "It's amazing stuff."<br /><br />Feel it—it's soft like snow, yet strangely abrasive.<br /><br />Taste it—"not half bad," according to Apollo 16 astronaut John Young. <br /><br />Sniff it—"it smells like spent gunpowder," says Cernan.<br /><br />How do you sniff moondust?<br /><br />Every Apollo astronaut did it. They couldn't touch their noses to the lunar surface. But, after every moonwalk (or "EVA"), they would tramp the stuff back inside the lander. Moondust was incredibly clingy, sticking to boots, gloves and other exposed surfaces. No matter how hard they tried to brush their suits before re-entering the cabin, some dust (and sometimes a lot of dust) made its way inside.<br /><br />Once their helmets and gloves were off, the astronauts could feel, smell and even taste the moon.<br /><br />The experience gave Apollo 17 astronaut Jack Schmitt history's first recorded case of extraterrestrial hay fever. "It's come on pretty fast," he radioed Houston with a congested voice. Years later he recalls, "When I took my helmet off after the first EVA, I had a significant reaction to the dust. My turbinates (cartilage plates in the walls of the nasal chambers) became swollen."<br /> <br />Hours later, the sensation faded. "It was there again after the second and third EVAs, but at much lower levels. I think I was developing some immunity to it."<br /><br />Other astronauts didn't get the hay fever. Or, at least, "they didn't admit it," laughs Schmitt. "Pilots think if they confess their symptoms, they'll be grounded." Unlike the other astronauts, Schmitt didn't have a test pilot background. He was a geologist and readily admitted to sniffles.<br /><br />Schmitt says he has sensitive turbinates: "The petrochemicals i

 

[mikeemmert]

Hmph. Fascintating. Thanks, zavvy.<br /><br />I think I'd have to go with the solar wind theory, mostly. That would mean that a very important component of the lunar samples was lost.<br /><br />And there's a lesson there. Extraterrestrail material must be kept sealed at all costs.<br /><br />That also saddens me because I have noticed that the Stardust samples were exposed to air. This is a major error. We discussed in the Nemesis thread how this hypothesized object could be found by the gasses adsorbed onto cometary particles. Two of them, deuterium and lithium, would be subject to loss from this.<br /><br />Daomn!!!

 

[mlorrey]

Ah, well, just means we need to go back for more. Don't know as lithium would be lost, but deuterium would certainly go away if it didn't bind with any oxygen and get held by the areogel.<br /><br />May be able to salvage something from it if the rate of contamination can be calculated and filtered out as noise.

 

[mikeemmert]

<blockquote><font class="small">In reply to:</font><hr /><p>May be able to salvage something from it if the rate of contamination can be calculated and filtered out as noise. <p><hr /></p></p></blockquote>Yeah, well, good luck, dude. <i>Maybe</i> you can do <i>something</i> but the results won't be of high quality. Personally, I think the experiment was ruined.<blockquote><font class="small">In reply to:</font><hr /><p>Ah, well, just means we need to go back for more.<p><hr /></p></p></blockquote>Ah, now <i>there's</i> a solution! Maybe we can go back and do it <i>better!</i>.<blockquote><font class="small">In reply to:</font><hr /><p>Don't know as lithium would be lost, but deuterium would certainly go away if it didn't bind with any oxygen and get held by the areogel. <p><hr /></p></p></blockquote>Hmm... well, lithium is highly flamable and binds to oxygen... try to think of some other marker if you can. I've got a little roadblock here.

 

[Philotas]

Considering that aeorogel is made up of 99,80% air, the particles had probably experienced contamination already by the time of Earth arrival.<br /><br />If you wait until Rosetta and Philae arrives at 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, you can be guaranteed uncontamined tests. Tests studied by robotic scientists, that is. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>

 

[mlorrey]

is the aerogel actually composed of air, or simply empty space that is filled with air when it is in atmosphere?

 

[mikeemmert]

Howdy, Philotas;<br /><br />Yeah, aerogel has an enormous surface to adsorb air, water, and whatever else might be in the manufacturing process.<br /><br />Forget aerogel. Forget bringing the samples back, for that matter. They will be contaminated for sure. Stardust can't do any meaniful tests for hydrogen, oxygen, or silicon content, including isotopic ratios.<br /><br />I would have to say the testing should be done <i>in situ</i>, thanks. <br /><br />So, what does the new mission look like?<br /><br />One powerful tool is spectrographic analysis. You need something to vaporize and heat the samples. How about a piece of foil in the front of the spacecraft? These thing go really fast, and if a piece of stardust hits the foil, there might be enough light given off to do spectrographic analysis. The foil should be something that gives a simple, unique spectrum so that it can be subtracted. Maybe also use a rare metal and sacrifice meaningful knowlege of that particular metal in the samples.<br /><br />That might be a job for leftover space shuttle parts. Build a monster rocket with five-segment boosters and five SSME's and a huge tank for centaur fuel. The faster it goes, the brigheter the impact flashes and the easier it is to record something.

 

[Philotas]

Found this on Stardust website: http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov/tech/aerogel.html<br /><br /><font color="yellow">"It is 99.8% Air"</font><br /><br /><font color="yellow">"This is a silicon-based solid with a porous, sponge-like structure in which 99.8 percent of the volume is empty space."</font><br /><br /><font color="yellow">"Why is it called a gel? <br /><br />During the production of aerogel a wet gel is formed which when dried becomes filled with air. Thus the name aerogel, which means: air gel." </font><br /><br /><br />A bit confusing, but it looks like that the air is trapped inside.<br /><br />You might want to download this factsheet in order to be sure: http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov/aerogel_factsheet.pdf (I don`t, since 2,9 MB takes ages on dial-up. )<br /><br /> <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>

 

[Philotas]

We already have this nice Rosetta/Philae mission launched: <br />http://rosetta.esa.int/science-e/www/object/index.cfm?fobjectid=31445&fbodylongid=894 <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>

 

[rogers_buck]

Seems to me that lunar and even martian EVA suits will want to be mated o the outside of the habitats. Orlons essentially have hatches in the back that the cosmonaut climbs into, so connecting the suits to a docking ring with a dust cover might be the best way to keep dust out of the habitat. Breathing those jagged silica daggers might do some serious silicosis dammage to human lungs if care isn't taken. Also, if the dust can trash an o-ring seal on the original Apollo mission containers, how do you keep it from eroding your hatch seals? Maybe the space suits attached to the outside of the vehicle will need to be connected via long tunnels and the whole habitat locomoted to new sites for EVAs?<br />

 

[mikeemmert]

Thanks, Philotas.<br /><br />I didn't read the aerogel pdf either. The people doing that mission have already done that. I think I'd run hot helium through the aerogel for a year or two.<br /><br />The Rosetta stuff was really interesting. I'm glad they're drilling into it, because right on the outer surface we're going to get the Sun's solar wind. Inside we might get the wind from the Sun's T-Tauri phase. That would be interesting. It'll be a good read apart from what I'm worried about right now.<br /><br />I'm trying to see if there's any way to falsify the Nemesis hypothesis (zavvy, if I'm hijacking your thread, come back and rescue it).<br /><br />We determined in a previous thread that Buffy is the most likely object to have stellar wind embedded from Nemesis rather than the Sun. Consideration of targets in between yields the name, "Drag Racing Astro Cruiser for Understanding Lagrange Accretions". <br /><br />Targets include Lagrange points, outer solar system moons, any asteroids or KBO's between here and Buffy, and the dust beyond the Kuiper belt cutoff at 47 AU. Another task would be understanding the Pioneer effect, if any.<br /><br />I expect a null result because I think Lagrange points have been swept clean during the production of large objects such as Pluto, Triton, and Titan. Since I think Jupiter didn't make large Lagrangians, that is a must target. That leaves six tertiary targets to choose from , L4 or L5 points of Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.<br /><br />To create dust particles for anaysis by a ram spectrometer and capture by aerogel collectors, DRACULA will carry a machine gun to strafe the target. Vampire's revenge...

 

[mlorrey]

Actually, it appears from the technical literature that the air evacuates in vacuum, so Stardust's aerogel should have been unpolluted and therefore should not have contaminated samples, provided the team did not unseal the reentry capsule outside of a controlled environment.

 

[mikeemmert]

Howdy, folks;<br /><br />I'm going to bump this thread because this story appeared today when I opened up my hotmail account where I have Space.com stored.<br /><br />"<font color="yellow">As scientists and engineers figure out how to return astronauts to the Moon, set up habitats, and mine lunar soil to produce anything from building materials to rocket fuels, they are scratching their heads over what to do about Moon dust. <br /><br />This troublesome material is every-where on the Moon’s surface. The powdery grit gets into everything, jamming seals and abrading spacesuit fabric. It also readily picks up an electrostatic charge. This characteristic causes it to float or levitate off the lunar surface and stick to faceplates and camera lenses. The fine dust might even be toxic<font color="white">".<br /><br />If you read back a little earlier in this thread, I would have to second that. Not that I know what kind of strange chemicals got embedded by the solar wind or are produced when the dust is exposed to air, but better safe than sorry.<br /><br />"<font color="yellow">Larry Taylor, distinguished professor of planetary sciences at the University of Tennessee, has an idea about what to do with this troublesome dust. He suggests that it can be melted into a useful material. "I am one of those weird people who like to stick things in ordinary kitchen microwave ovens to see what happens," Taylor admitted to several hundred scientists at a recent Lunar Exploration Advisory Group (LEAG) conference at NASA Johnson. At home in Tennessee, his most famous experiment involves a bar of Irish Spring soap, which quickly turns into "an abominable monster" when the micro-wave’s start button is hit.<br /><br />However, the experiment he described at LEAG involved transforming Moon dust: He once put a small pile of lunar soil brought back by Apollo astronauts into a microwave oven. Taylor found that it melted ra</font></font></font>