How will they build streets from surface dust on the moon?

After more than 50 years, Humans plan to return to the moon in 2025 With the mission of Artemis III. But while tests and flights are being developed before landing on the new moon, scientists are already thinking about it Our natural satellite as a location for a permanent base.

Yes good The moon presents the challenges of not having oxygen or liquid water. And recording a maximum temperature range of up to 250 degrees, which is one of the most puzzling challenges for space agencies hoping to establish a lunar colony. Dust that corrodes space suits, It clogs machines, interferes with scientific instruments, and makes travel difficult.

The dust on the Moon consists largely of lunar volcanic rock that has been turned into dust by cosmic impacts and radiation over millions of years. Although the moon usually appears white to us due to the reflection of sunlight, The lunar soil is actually mostly dark grey.

While the Earth has winds and water to erode its soil, the Moon does not do so in lunar dust.Many particles have sharp edgesJuan Carlos Genis Palomares, an aerospace engineer at Aalen University in Germany, explained. Therefore, it could pose a great danger to space exploration.

Now scientists have found a potential solution to this problem, showing that lunar dust can be dissolved using a giant lens to create solid paths and landing zones. The results are published in the journal Scientific reports.

“You can think: “Streets on the moon, who needs them?”said Professor Jens Gunster of the Federal Institute for Materials Research and Testing in Berlin and co-author of a report on the potential solution. “But it’s actually been kind of frustrating litigation (even) from the beginning. It is very loose matter, there is no atmosphere, gravity is weakDust spreads everywhere. It not only contaminates its equipment, but also contaminates the equipment of other countries. “No one wants to be covered in dust by another missile,” the expert said.

Dust has destroyed previous missions, such as the Surveyor 3 spacecraft (which was damaged by dust from the Apollo 12 landing), and overcoming this challenge is a priority for NASA, which aims to establish a permanent outpost on the moon’s surface. Transporting building materials to the Moon would be very expensive, so unconventional solutions are needed. “You have to take advantage of what’s there, which is just loose dust,” Gunster says.

One way to prevent lunar dust from damaging rovers as they roam the lunar surface is to obtain it Driving on paved roads on the moon. However, transporting building materials from Earth is expensive, so researchers want to rely as much as possible on the lunar resources themselves. And in a new studyJenis Palomares, an aerospace engineer at Aalen University in Germany He and his colleagues experimented with a fine-grained material called EAC-1A, which the space agency developed as an alternative to lunar soil. They wanted to know if concentrated sunlight could melt lunar dust into rock blocks.

they used A 50 mm diameter laser beam heats the powder to about 1600°C and melts it. They slowly drew flexible triangular shapes, each about 25 centimeters wide, that could interlock to form solid surfaces on large swaths of lunar soil, to serve as future landing routes and platforms.

The process is not fast. Each small engineering unit took about an hour to produce, meaning that creating a 10 x 10 m landing site would take about 100 days. “It seems like an eternity, but think about the buildings on the ground,” Gunster says. “Sometimes it takes a long time to build a new crossing.”

To replicate this approach on the Moon, the researchers calculated A lens of approximately 2.37 square meters must be moved from the floor So it works as a concentrator for sunlight instead of a laser. The lens can be made of a polymer sheet that can be rolled up, making it easier to transport. But dust will still be a problem for the lens itself. “When dust builds up on a lens, sooner or later it will stop working,” Gunster said, adding that a shaky lens can help alleviate that problem.

Previous research has suggested that intense sunlight or laser beams could consolidate lunar soil into dense, solid structures. However, previous experiments have never produced clumps of this size, nor used light beams of this size or power. Future experiments should investigate how well these panels can withstand rocket thrust to see if they can be used for landing runways.