Our landing simulator: https://simoonlation.netlify.com/

At first, our team made a very long list of questions about the moon dust, it's composition and ideas how to solve all the problems that lunar dust creates before people will be able to build the base on the Moon.

On this 2-day journey, we learned that dust is corrosive, abrasive, gritty, has ruining effects on electrical systems, and reduces visibility outside. It causes damage to astronaut's lungs and eyes, and affects nervous, and cardiovascular systems as well.

Many pieces of research are in course to combat the electrostatic charge of the lunar dust can cling to any surface such as the use of a "Double Shell Spacesuit", the use of electrodynamic dust shield, the use of high–grade magnetic separation, and the use of solar flux to sinter and melt the regolith, splitting the powder into gaseous oxygen and metals.

The one idea we found particularly interesting was that NASA is looking at the possibility of sintering the lunar dust using microwave radiation in order to fuse the nanoparticle dust into a solid ceramic-like block. That would serve as a binding material and maybe would even allow for building roads. What a great solution to help with settlement problem on the Moon!!!

BUT, we thought, what do you need to do first to successfully build a base on the Moon? Well, you need to land safely.

That's why we decided to create a landing simulator to help all the pilots choose the best place to land safely dust-wise.

And we were back to our first question. What do we know about lunar dust?

So far we knew that it is like a tiny invader: it's everywhere, it can damage any equipment, and it's impossible to get rid of.

That means there's no dust-free space on the Moon and we needed to find out:

- are there places where there's less dust?

- if so - why there's less dust in some places?

- what are the main factors?

We started consulting several sources:

At first we went straight to https://moon.nasa.gov/

Then, we checked 'Lunar sourcebook' (Heiken, G. H., Vaniman, D. T., & French, B. M. (1991). Lunar sourcebook-A user's guide to the moon. Research supported by NASA,. Cambridge, England, Cambridge University Press)

https://www.lpi.usra.edu/publications/books/lunar_sourcebook/pdf/LunarSourceBook.pdf

Then we read some Apollo chronicles go.nasa.gov/2Bk6EdI

Then we checked LADEE info (NASA's Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE)

go.nasa.gov/31nbfGt; Moon Dust Mission: How NASA's LADEE Spacecraft Works (Infographic)

bit.ly/2MNiUbN)

Then we read fascinating Mystery of Moon Dust bit.ly/2nQ5y67

Eventually, we even checked whether our Moon have weather!!! https://www.forbes.com/sites/marshallshepherd/2019/07/18/does-our-moon-have-weather/#32886d7a45b2

By then we knew that to build a good Simoonlator we need to include:

- thickness of the dust in specific places

- how old is the surface in a place to land (because the older the surface the thicker the regolith)

- if it's in highlands or maria or what (surprisingly, the regolith is thicker in highlands, and very thin on crater floors)

- what time of the day the landing occurs (there are good and bad times for landing and take off because the temperature on the Moon swings wildly from freezing cold to boiling hot; this also has influence on how sticky the dust is because it is very electrically active!)

That is how we end up with a very user friendly Simoonlator that allows pilots to calibrate their direction, choose a place to land based on the area they are interested in, or coordinates of the landing place.

The Simoonlator displays the info on:

Thickness of the regolith

Current temperature

Electrostatics

Age of the surface

Chemical composition

The idea is fully formed but the Simoonlator itself is only in its starting phase because it's a relatively big and complex idea that can't be executed in three days. So we decided to create a prototype to show what could be done. We want to keep working on it, add more places to the database, improve the information we have (so a lot more research needs to be done).

The next steps we plan for the projects are:

- adding more places to the database (maria and highlands)
- improve 'dust-wise' analysis (thickness, temperature, electrostatics)

Eventually, we would like to create a map of the surface of the Moon that will show relatively low-dust places that are safe to land or build on. And if humans start using lunar dust as a resource (by this microwaving we mentioned at the beginning) it would be really good to know where there's a lot of dust too!

the code for the Simoonlator lives here: https://github.com/alexbelloni/simoonlation

it was built with: Javascript, React, and Netlify (the hosting tool)

tags: #moon, #manonthemoon, #moondust, #lunardust, #simulation, #simulator, #simoonlation, #datanautsnsimoonlators, #landingsimulation, #moonlanding, #moonbase, #regolith, #lunar, #landing, #javascript, #react, #netlify, #nasamoon

other NASA resources we used:

https://sservi.nasa.gov/data-resources/

https://sservi.nasa.gov/?post_type=question

https://science.nasa.gov/citizenscience

https://moon.nasa.gov/moon-toolkit/

https://www.nasa.gov/specials/moon2mars/#top

https://www.nasa.gov/specials/moon2mars/#surface

https://lunar.gsfc.nasa.gov/publications-lroteam.html

https://lunar.gsfc.nasa.gov/dataproducts.html

https://curator.jsc.nasa.gov/lunar/letss/regolith.pdf

https://curator.jsc.nasa.gov/lunar/