Project Details

Awards & Nominations

Dust Detector has received the following awards and nominations. Way to go!

Global Nominee

The Challenge | Dust Yourself Off

The Apollo missions showed us that lunar dust not only clung to everything and was impossible to fully remove, but it was also dangerous to humans and damaging to spacecraft systems. Your challenge is to develop a way to detect, map, and mitigate lunar dust to reduce the effects on astronauts or spacecraft interior systems.

lunar dust mitigation system

our project is a system which works on different tools and make mitigation of dust quite easy. this system works on two tools one is cold gas thrust system based drone for the detection purpose and embedded nano tech vibrators used for mitigation of dust.

when me and my team was studying and analyzing the problem we started thinking as lay man with naive mind. someone stated that polythene would be right so that can be wasted before entering the hatch. some one said usage of hydrophobic coating would be nice. but then we study the resources which has provided by NASA and also visit the site links that was provided by NASA. we check out what type of methodology applied before for this particular type of problem's solution. and i after that i studied the lunar soil and its properties .... then we found that the lunar dust is completely dry and in the form of grains and we have to mitigate that dust from astronauts suits and the moon lander. so, we decided to make drone which will be operated on cold gas thrust based system having sensors such as hyperspectral LIDAR etc which will be used for the decision of landing site weather this site or premises is good enough to land where the dust contact would be minimum. and that will surely gonna help astronauts to protect themselves from lunar dust as well as other issues also its helps in image processing. then we find a solution to mitigate dust by vibrations as dust are just grains so they can be remove from suits by using nano tech ultrasonic vibrators based on DC MOTORS that can remove the dust from suit.and prevent the hatch from it. the seals of the hatch will be covered by a compressible membrane in which the vibrators remove the dust from the suit. and reverse polarity mechanism will held the particles not to enter in the hatch.