The Chercheurs| 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.
The Final Solution
We have worked on the properties of dielectric moon dust, and have successfully came up with an idea of minimizing the dust content on the spacesuit, hatch and interior system, by introducing electric field in combination with highly pressurized air.
Moon dust is dielectric in nature & is adhesive to almost every material that it comes in contact with. This creates problem for astronauts & their spacecrafts as clogging takes place. To overcome this problem we researched the topic thoroughly & came up with a mechanism that will minimize the dust content on the surface of spacecraft.
Biggest challenge was to tackle the high stream of lunar dust in the orbiters' path. Also the hatch & astronaut suit was taken into consideration for minimizing the damage. This led us to whole new research of moon, its surface properties & effect of other exotic body on it.