Regolith Boys| Dust Yourself Off
Project Details
Awards & Nominations
Regolith Boys 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.
ReCleaning
This is our project for Dust Yourself Off. The detection and mapping will be done through a circuit with the help of UV rays and mitigation by ions and electromagnet
In our brainstorm we had the idea of extracting using electromagnets because it is very effective since the regolith is very magnetic and a mapping using images, but due to the small extruder size of the regolith grain, budget, time and asset availability that were at our disposal. We concluded that ultraviolet rays would be the best option for mapping.
To solve the problem then we decided to build a prototype with:
- Arduino with UV Sensor;
- UV LED;
For extraction we also made an eletromagnet
Also to simulate the rigolite we use dry cement
And the EMU a white piece of cloth.
For measurement the environment was isolated from light in a black box and the result was a success since the readings of the white piece of cloth without cement, with the cement and after ionization and also cleaning showed a good process efficiency.