SpaceFolletti| Dust Yourself Off

Project Details

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.

MONROE - MOoN dust RemOval systEm

MONROE is your new mum-in-space! It uses ELTON to prevent dust sticking to astronauts and BATMAN to vanish any remaining dust once you're back in the lunar module.

SpaceFolletti

Project's Report

Project Report (OverLeaf)

Background

Our choice is to solve the Dust Yourself Off challenge. Returning on the Moon is the hot topic for the next decade and we, as space engineering students, are very into it. The thought of ending up with an idea that could help future explorations in terms of safety and efficiency inspired our researches.

“The entire lunar surface was covered with this mantle of broken-up material, fine dust of varying depth. As a result, everything looked pretty much the same …” (Wagner, 2006)

What it does

MONROE is thought to try to reduce the quantity of lunar dust on board a spacecraft by means of the use of different devices following a strict protocol. First of all, to prevent the dust entering the fabric, a thin layer of Teflon (cfr. ELTON - Teflon protection film) is added to the astronaut's space suit. Then, once the astronaut, covered with dust, has to go back into the ascending module s/he should follow a sequence of passages:

  1. Enter the inflatable cabin (cfr. modified BEAM module).
  2. Use the BATMAN to remove the bigger quantity of dust.
  3. Remove the film suit and the soles.
  4. Enter the pressurized cabin.
  5. Do optical analysis to detect residual dust.
  6. Clean off the residual dust with CRUSH (crf. CRUSH - Dielectric rotating brush).
  7. Take off the space suit and enter the ascending module.

To do so, two deployable modules are added to the spacecraft: once the landing is complete they are inflated to provide the space to follow the protocol. Once the mission is complete, the external cabin is repacked into a sealed box.

Sub-systems:

Modified BEAM module. Two inflatable modules where to wear up ELTON and where to do the cleaning procedures. They are an adaptation of the Bigelow's First Base module.

ELTON - Teflon protection film. To protect the astronaut from the lunar dust when s/he is outside this protective film made of Teflon is put on the space suit and removed when the Moon walk is finished.

BATMAN - Vibrating rotating device. A vibrating holed plate is exploited to set the dust left on the suit in motion, so that it can be attracted into DANTE.

DANTE - Discharging tube. This component exploits the magnetic field to capture the lunar dust in the most external module and make it goes outside.

CRUSH - Dielectric rotating brush. This device allows the astronauts to clean specific regions where oddments of lunar dust are still present after the removal of ELTON.

Further Development

Removable film on helmet . An helmet flexible transparent cover to increase the protected area.

Detection system. Once ELTON is removed further investigations on the dust presence are needed to use CRUSH. These can be done by exploiting the different optical properties of the suit and of the lunar dust.