Lunar dust mitigation requires collaboration and lots of tests

Collaboration has always been a hallmark of space research. Experts in different disciplines come together to work toward a common goal, and many times achieve that. One of the current goals of space exploration is long-term settlement of the moon, and in order to achieve that goal, engineers and astronauts will have to deal with one of the thorniest problems on that otherworldly body—dust.

Lunar dust is much harder to deal with than Earth’s equivalent, as it is sharp, charged, and sticks to everything, including biological tissue such as lungs, and even relatively smooth surfaces like glass. Several research groups are working on mitigation techniques that can deal with lunar dust, but a new cross-collaborative group from the University of Central Florida is developing a coating, testing it, and simulating all in one project, with the hopes that someday their solution will make it easier for astronauts to explore our nearest neighbor.

There are four different groups at UCF contributing to the project, each with their own specialty. The project itself is focused on developing a way to passively mitigate lunar dust. Their solution takes the form of a coating, which can be applied to surfaces like sensors or gears to ensure either dust doesn’t cling to them, or that, if it does, that it can easily be removed by spraying it with air or lightly shaking it, without the dust itself damaging the surface it was resting on.

Developing the coating is obviously critical to the project, and that is the responsibility of Dr. Lei Zhai of UCF’s Nanoscience Technology Center. The coating’s job is to both protect the surface it’s placed on, but also repel any dust surrounding it. Repelling the dust, in this case, means both electrostatically and physically, but it can also utilize resources available on the moon that aren’t available on Earth, such as the solar wind or high levels of radiation.

Since radiation is a key component of any space technology, testing the coating in radiation is a key part of the project. To do so, the team will use a vacuum chamber with radiation sources hooked into it managed by Dr. Adrienne Dove, the chair of UCF’s Department of Physics and an expert on lunar dust physics. In the chamber, the coating will be blasted with radiation and subjected to lunar regolith simulant to test how it deals with environmental conditions as close to the moon as possible on Earth’s surface.

Both before and after that testing, the coating will be examined by an atomic force microscope (AFM), operated by Dr. Laurene Tetard’s group. AFMs are capable of analyzing nano-scale changes to surfaces, and would be very effective in mapping any damage to the coating, or individual dust particles that might get stuck to it. Any differences that would show up in the before and after images could lead to improvement in the coating physics, which could set up a virtuous circle of testing and improvements.

It could also lead to better simulations, which is where the fourth group in the project comes in. Dr. Tarek Elgohary, a mechanical engineering professor, is responsible for developing a simulation that mimics how the coating interacts with the dust particles, so eventually the project team could run simulations to test how different configurations of coating surfaces might affect that interaction. Such simulations could also predict failure modes, and help the rest of the team plan to mitigate or test for such an eventuality.

Engineers’ battle with lunar dust is only getting started, but it will pick up in intensity as humans get closer to going back to the moon.