[HN Gopher] All 12 moonwalkers had "lunar hay fever" from dust s...
___________________________________________________________________
All 12 moonwalkers had "lunar hay fever" from dust smelling like
gunpowder (2018)
Author : cybermango
Score : 181 points
Date : 2026-04-17 18:17 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.esa.int)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.esa.int)
| m463 wrote:
| we have similar problems with volcanic ash on earth
| jMyles wrote:
| I walked up to the flows on Fagradalsfjall when it was erupting
| a couple of years ago, and I found the cinereous, sulfurous air
| to be very medicinal and clearing. I'm not sure it'd have good
| for me for more than a few hours, but as it was, it was great.
| I occasionally wish I were able to just have a chamber with
| that air in it.
| kzrdude wrote:
| There are some saunas on Iceland that expose you to earth
| gasses, might be exactly the kind of chamber you are after.
| I've visited one, and it was unfortunately cold for a sauna
| because that's naturally varying too.
| tim-tday wrote:
| Exactly, but the lack of a water cycle on the moon means that
| all the dust is sharp and always will be.
|
| It will irritate human mucus membranes whenever it comes in
| contact. Irritate lungs, eyes, skin.
|
| It degrades rubber seals.
| jjmarr wrote:
| Have any of them developed cancer from the space asbestos yet?
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| Only 4 are still alive, all in their 90s so that'd be a long
| time - even if some do have cancer at this stage it's not
| likely to affect life expectancy I guess.
| AngryData wrote:
| We also have to remember that those astronauts were some of
| the most physically fit individuals in a nation of hundreds
| of millions which may skew the expected medical outcomes.
| Especially if we assume they always had the best healthcare
| available, if from nothing else than doctors asking similiar
| qiestions about the effects of space travel.
| wat10000 wrote:
| The exposure was brief, too. Wikipedia says mesothelioma
| has been known to develop from exposures of "only" 1 month.
| That's a scary short time if it's in your home or
| workplace, but comfortably longer than an Apollo mission.
| Could be an issue for a future base, though.
| bdamm wrote:
| It definitely puts a damper on my personal enthusiasm for
| visiting the moon hotel, or even encouraging researchers
| to live there.
| altmanaltman wrote:
| I mean Neil Armstrong literally smoked and did not
| "believe" in excercise so they were absolutely not the most
| physically fittest people. They were just freaks in terms
| of enduring a lot of stress tests. Physical endurance is
| just one aspect they train for. Other aspects were much
| more valued like them being military flight pilots/smart
| enough to understand the systems/mentally strong enough to
| not break down etc. You were not selecting for absolute raw
| fitness for the apollo missions.
| themafia wrote:
| The military does not survey the population and then select
| the fittest. So, as a function, it cannot actually perform
| as you say.
|
| It's the same with F1. "We have the best drivers in the
| world!" You have the best drivers from the self-selection
| mechanism you impose on the sport. There are zero reasons
| to think these categories have good overlap.
| zamadatix wrote:
| They don't need to have sampled the entire population to
| have ended up with some of the most x individuals of the
| nation of y population size, they just need a large
| enough pool that the top end up among some of the best.
| tempaccount5050 wrote:
| That's just simply not true at all, I don't know where
| you're getting this idea. Literally every Olympic athlete
| was more fit that an any astronaut ever.
| porphyra wrote:
| Even with actual asbestos, the risk goes up a lot with duration
| and intensity of exposure. Probably, the risks of getting
| cancer from a brief exposure is fairly low, and combined with
| the ridiculously small sample size of only 12 people to ever
| set foot on the moon, it's natural that none of them got "moon
| cancer". That said, with asbesto, it's still possible to get
| cancer even from brief exposures:
|
| > Although it is clear that the health risks from asbestos
| exposure increase with heavier exposure and longer exposure
| time, investigators have found asbestos-related diseases in
| individuals with only brief exposures. Generally, those who
| develop asbestos-related diseases show no signs of illness for
| a long time after exposure. It can take from 10 to 40 years or
| more for symptoms of an asbestos-related condition to appear.
| [1]
|
| [1] https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-
| prevention/risk/s...
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Part of what makes asbestos (and also fiberglass) dangerous,
| isn't just the sharpness but also the long shape which means
| that macrophages can't engulf them.
|
| Moon dust is still problematic since although smaller it also
| can't be digested by macrophages and it's believed it would
| accumulate in the lungs, building up on repeated exposure.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| Sounds to me like the threat would be silicosis.
| OsrsNeedsf2P wrote:
| They describe the dust on the moon as,
|
| > Fine like powder, but sharp like glass
|
| Sounds scary. But totally worth it!
| krunck wrote:
| Mars has toxic levels of perchlorates in the regolith. That will
| require that humans never come in contact with the regolith or
| things that touched it. Those space suits that dock to vehicles
| seem like a necessity.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perchlorate#On_Mars
| snthpy wrote:
| TIL
| tim-tday wrote:
| Yeah, the ground on mars is literally toxic. Makes the concept
| of a Martian colony less appealing. Almost equal to a floating
| station on Venus. At least there you'd have the correct
| pressure. I seem to recall that the temperature on Venus at an
| altitude of one atmospheric pressure is manageable. It's just
| also acidic. Possibility easier to deal with than perchlorates.
| MengerSponge wrote:
| Mars is so bad, y'all.
| card_zero wrote:
| Since the perchlorate is generated by reaction with sunlight,
| it might be limited to a surface layer.
|
| Well, I guess that's what regolith means.
| kzrdude wrote:
| Regolith is all the loose stuff, everything that's not
| bedrock, even if it might be quite deep.
| vondur wrote:
| Rocket fuel for the taking?
| lukan wrote:
| Without massive terraforming all of Mars is very hostile.
|
| But having solid ground is still nice.
|
| A workable compromise is making big habitats in a dome, that
| gives sunlight, but shields from radiation. And the ground
| needs to be processed obviously.
|
| The advantage of Venus to me is is gravity.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| Gravity kind of cuts both ways. Closer to that of Earth is
| nearly guaranteed to be better for long term human health,
| but there's a possibility that martian gravity is "good
| enough" when supplemented with excercise while also making
| heavy operations and getting back out of the planet's
| gravity well easier.
| cduzz wrote:
| Venus seems like a wonderful place to live, relatively
| speaking.
|
| At the right altitude where you can "float" on the ocean,
| it's a pretty comfortable temperature and there's plenty of
| solar energy but you're shielded from the solar radiation.
| So, long term, your body will still work, assuming you can
| solve "the other problems."
|
| Of course, the down-side is that there's nothing to stand
| on and probably more importantly, there aren't many useful
| materials to work with besides tons of carbon, oxygen, and
| nitrogen. Not much hydrogen there, so not much water, which
| probably is the biggest problem. One of them, anyhow. Also,
| there's probably not a whole lot to do besides float (zoom,
| actually) around and slowly go stir crazy in your bubble.
|
| But relatively speaking, it's way nicer than living in a
| hole on mars where you'll slowly die from gravity sickness,
| or radiation poisoning, or whatever.
| jcranmer wrote:
| > Not much hydrogen there, so not much water, which
| probably is the biggest problem.
|
| Actually, the cloud layer at that level is mostly
| sulfuric acid, from which you can get your water. It also
| means you need to be in a hazmat suit when you walk
| outside, but that's still a step up from everywhere else,
| where you need a bulky pressure suit instead.
| operatingthetan wrote:
| If we terraform mars, isn't the dirt still toxic?
| lukan wrote:
| No, as terraforming means changing that.
|
| Whether it is really possible, is a different question,
| but after you have an atmosphere, you could have
| engineered microorganism processing the soil etc.
| operatingthetan wrote:
| In that sense then the term "terraforming" is on equal
| footing with alchemy.
| wolvoleo wrote:
| Doing something like that at planetary scale is science
| fiction anyway even if we did have the tech to do it.
| naravara wrote:
| If you can kick off self-sustaining biological processes
| it'll happen on its own eventually, but you'd just be
| looking at generational time scales to do it.
|
| Of course you'll probably have lots of side-effects.
| generic92034 wrote:
| I would not be so pessimistic. Look what the
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyanobacteria have done for
| our atmosphere.
| baq wrote:
| Talking to computers and expecting computers to answer
| coherent English was science fiction 4 years ago. Don't
| lose faith
| wincy wrote:
| Maybe we'll turn all of Mars into paperclips with our
| efforts! Glorious paperclips. First Mars, then the
| universe!
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _In that sense then the term "terraforming" is on equal
| footing with alchemy_
|
| NASA has proposed using "synthetic biology to take
| advantage of and improve upon natural perchlorate
| reducing bacteria. These terrestrial microbes are not
| directly suitable for off-world use, but their key genes
| pcrAB and cld...catalyze the reduction of perchlorates to
| chloride and oxygen" [1].
|
| [1] https://www.nasa.gov/general/detoxifying-mars/
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Just exposing the Martian soil to water for some time is
| enough to destroy the perchlorates.
|
| (Turns out there's a region in Antarctic with them too,
| so we can always test things there.)
| tarr11 wrote:
| I wonder if it will turn out to be easier to adapt
| lifeforms to the planets than to try to adapt the planets
| to the lifeforms.
| lukan wrote:
| Both probably, but you cannot really adapt life to no
| water and hard radiation. (at most sustain it in stasis,
| but not growing)
| nradov wrote:
| Which dome construction material would be transparent to
| sunlight but block ionizing radiation?
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| 1) Why do you need sunlight?
|
| 2) If you have a source of hydrogen: water. Bonus as you
| don't have to make the dome hold pressure. A layer of
| water of the right depth will generate the force needed,
| the structure only needs to keep itself level. The only
| pressure holding is outside that, enough to keep the
| water from boiling. And, well, it's water--if it's hit by
| a rock that isn't too big you'll just have hole in the
| top layer, easily fixed. The same general idea would work
| on the Moon but the water is far from transparent if you
| pile up enough of it and you need a lot of hydrogen.
| lukan wrote:
| Well, I did wrote "gives sunlight" and that is a valid
| reply to it. But ... I would need sunlight actually. That
| seems somewhat possible with light tubes, but the much
| nicer solution, a transparent dome to still see mars
| clouds at day and the stars at night, is indeed not
| possible with current materials.
| ozgung wrote:
| Sadly we underestimate the liveability of this Earth. Muskism
| makes people believe to the false premise that we can just
| buy a new planet, make it habitable with magical tech.
| Supported with pseudoscientific buzzwords like Terraforming
| etc. So we can recklessly consume this planet and jump to our
| new home when this one depletes. No need to care about our
| current home because it's a jumping board. Interesting as an
| old Sci-Fi fantasy so it attracts smart people, but if you
| really think about it's just lies and stupidity.
| tim333 wrote:
| Musk was also into the solar panels and EVs so it's not all
| trash the planet. Even if living on Mars or Venus isn't
| practical we might develop interesting tech trying.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Wasn't the solar panels thing just some financial fraud
| scheme?
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| Another interesting one is Mercury. There is a latitude where
| the average ground temperature is comfortable for us. You
| simply need to dig in deep enough to put enough thermal mass
| above you to get that average rather than the swings. I don't
| know how deep that is on Mercury, on Earth 10 meters is
| enough. Real world, you'll want to go a bit farther towards
| the pole so your station is comfortable with the thermal load
| of whatever equipment you put in it.
| ck2 wrote:
| there's a great PBS Space Time for that (of course)
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5FqozA4IpA
| darknavi wrote:
| If this fact piques your interest, the book Delta-v by Daniel
| Suarez glances off this fact and uses it to justify exploring
| asteroid mining instead of a colony on Mars.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| I'm not impressed with his science.
| imglorp wrote:
| Or effective decontamination performed in the airlock. There
| was a recent demonstration of an electrostatic repulsion device
| reducing dust on suit fabric which might help with sticking.
| And an air shower like used for clean rooms does not seem too
| far out.
| nomel wrote:
| Is that required?
|
| Could the suit itself be used as a type of airlock, to leave
| outside things outside?
|
| For example, mounting yourself onto a wall, then the
| back/whatever of the suit opens to the inside, and you hop
| out? (yes, there would be some dust recovery required, but
| minimal in comparison)
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _mounting yourself onto a wall, then the back /whatever
| of the suit opens to the inside, and you hop out?_
|
| Isn't there a plan for the Artemis lunar rover to be
| configured this way? The outside of the suit never comes
| inside the rover.
| imglorp wrote:
| The challenge with the "suits stay outside" model is that
| you basically need some kind of airlock between the suit
| hatch and the ship hatch. You might imagine both hatches
| get contaminated when the suit is detached. Then when you
| dock, that whole between-hatch space needs to be
| decontaminated before you can open the two hatches, because
| the outside of the suit hatch brought that stuff into the
| airlock.
|
| Someone else linked to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
| Space_Exploration_Vehicle#Spec...
|
| edit: in that context^ search for "SEV suitport design"
| find NASA has written some docs on the matter, eg https://n
| trs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20130013652/downloads/20...
| chromacity wrote:
| Calcium perchlorate is only slightly toxic. Not good for you,
| but living in an environment with background radiation levels
| 50x higher than on Earth may be your bigger worry...
|
| Still, I'm pretty sure we have plenty of people who wouldn't
| mind giving it a try.
| mr_toad wrote:
| > That will require that humans never come in contact with the
| regolith or things that touched it.
|
| It's really only a concern if you ingest it.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| Personally, I suspect all anoxic environments will turn out to
| be unhealthy for humans. You'll have a bunch of reactive stuff
| about that on Earth would have been neutralized long ago.
| BFV wrote:
| That's such a weirdly specific detail but also kinda fascinating.
| Imagine going to the Moon and the first thing you notice is
| "huh... smells like gunpowder.
| skywhopper wrote:
| I just had a filling replaced at the dentist yesterday and when
| he was grinding away at it to shape it, I would get a terrible
| whiff of something like gunpowder. It was quite disturbing.
|
| But now I can just tell everyone my tooth is filled with moon
| dust.
| tcp_handshaker wrote:
| "The toxic side of the Moon" -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47768039
| ortusdux wrote:
| This is a big perk of the newer lunar rover design, wherein the
| suits stay outside the vehicle -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Exploration_Vehicle#Spec...
|
| There has been some great research into laser or solar sintering
| of regolith, and one of my first questions was if the resulting
| material is safe for humans.
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-42008-1
| corysama wrote:
| I recall an article from a long time ago that basically said
| "astronauts report" the moon smells like spent gunpowder and
| outer space smell like... I think it was ozone.
|
| What they were actually reporting was the smell of the airlocks
| after they returned from their excursions. The moon has no
| atmosphere, so it has been accumulating dust from billions of
| years of asteroid impacts that have never come in contact with
| oxygen. Many of the chemicals in the dust are oxidative and so
| when it is exposed to air for the first time it rapidly
| _oxidizes_ just like gunpowder!
|
| And I think the outer space report was from space walks, and the
| explanation was that the first time the airlock itself was
| exposed to hard vacuum, the surfaces of the airlock would have a
| reaction that left a scent of ozone.
| Bender wrote:
| My UV sterilizing lights make my room smell like O3 _Ozone_ and
| that smells nothing like spent gun-powder to me. The only other
| time I have smelled the same thing is when there has been mass
| lightening events in the sky. Were they talking about actual
| black powder or nitrocellulose? I 've smelled black powder at
| the range when people bring out their antique rifles and that
| also does not smell like Ozone to me.
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| Photocopiers smell like ozone when they run if anyone's
| forgotten the smell
| Bender wrote:
| _Photocopiers smell like ozone when they run if anyone's
| forgotten the smell_
|
| Those are similar but sweeter. If I sterilize a room with
| UV it has a very distinct smell like nothing else aside
| from lightening and stun guns. I would UV the bathroom
| right now but then I have to vent the entire house and its
| 34F outside right now.
| echelon wrote:
| I don't think any of you should want to be smelling
| Ozone.
|
| Diatomic oxygen is already a highly reactive fuel that is
| killing us and giving us cancer every single day. The
| ozone species is even more oxidative.
|
| Oxygen is how we move about the energy gradient, but it's
| also killing us. Ozone is worse.
|
| "Air purifiers" with ionization are probably not worth
| the squeeze.
| Bender wrote:
| Absolutely. I vent the house after running UV lamps using
| a 4400 CFM air mover. _I leave the house and run
| errands._ I have 3 of these [1]
|
| They have a remote control that "arms" them and it starts
| beeping slow, the faster, then much faster then
| activates. It kills insects be destroying their lungs and
| entirely destroys mold, bacteria and even damages viral
| material. Hospitals run the same lamps in wings that they
| close down for sanitation. The entire area has to be 100%
| vented.
|
| [1] - https://www.amazon.com/AeraLight-Whole-Surface-UV-
| Sanitizer/...
| alfiedotwtf wrote:
| I worked for a germaphobe, and he put one of these ozone-
| injecting air purifiers in our tiny office. Every morning
| I would walk in and it felt like I was walking into a
| thunderstorm from the smell. No gunpowder, just thick
| ozone
| dmurray wrote:
| Aside from "killing us and giving us cancer every single
| day", isn't "diatomic oxygen" the stuff we breathe every
| single minute and need to survive?
|
| I'm not normally one to miss the sarcastic or satirical
| posts, but this one seems oddly earnest.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _isn 't "diatomic oxygen" the stuff we breathe every
| single minute and need to survive?_
|
| I think they're referring to oxidative stress [1] caused
| by cellular respiration.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxidative_stress
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| The permissible exposure limit for ozone is 0.1 PPM.
|
| The IDLH (Immediately Dangerous to Life and Health) level
| for ozone is five ppm.
|
| That's half of _chlorine_ which is 10 ppm.
|
| Most major brand air purifiers put out a very minimal
| amount; the ionization is beneficial because it makes the
| really tiny (and thus most hazardous) particles clump and
| fall/stick to surfaces faster.
|
| It's the offbrand units that generate lots of ozone to
| make people think they're "doing something", and
| commercial ozone generators for car/room deodorizing,
| that you have to be extremely careful with. Those need to
| be set up and then the room left for hours for the ozone
| to react with stuff, and then ventilated thoroughly.
| colechristensen wrote:
| You might be smelling the oxidation of biologicals via
| ozone and UV might have the same chemical effect
| rrr_oh_man wrote:
| Side quest: Can you tell more about the UV sterilisation
| thing? Why do you do that? How often? Where? It seems
| like such a specific thing to do.
| Bender wrote:
| I primarily use them in the bathroom to kill off mold and
| bacteria about once every 3 months. I open up the water
| heater closet, drawers, etc... then I fire one of them
| up. I've used them in other places but the more they are
| used the more I have to vent the house.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| The only thing you're doing by sterilizing your house
| like that is making your immune system weaker.
|
| Humans are built to withstand a _constant_ assault on
| their immune systems. We couldn 't have survived if we
| didn't.
| VoidWarranty wrote:
| Careful. The venn diagram bubble depicting your statement
| overlaps heavily with the anti-vaccine bubble.
|
| Its a bit naieve to claim that cleaning one's home will
| result in an extinction of enough microbes so as to be
| threatening to our immune system.
| Bender wrote:
| Don't worry I know what I am doing.
| LoganDark wrote:
| Brushed DC motors (as in some drills, toothbrushes, etc.)
| emit ozone. Some light switches also create ozone-
| producing electrical arcing if you hold them perfectly
| between the on and off positions, or slowly cross the
| midpoint. (Less easy with the newer-style, less
| accessible rocker switches.)
| saltcured wrote:
| I also associate ozone with some electric motors, I think
| because they have brushes that arc during operation. Older
| power tools I encountered in the 1980s often did this, and
| you could see the blue arc if you looked into the vents at
| the right angle.
| mr_toad wrote:
| 'Ozone' is the smell of ionisation, 'gunpowder' the smell of
| oxidisation.
| corysama wrote:
| The ozone report was specifically about space walks. The
| gunpowder report was about moon walks.
|
| Presumably, moonwalks would also have some ozone like the
| space walk did. But, maybe the burning-moon-dust gunpowder
| smell was a lot stronger than the vacuumed-metal/paint ozone
| smell.
| helterskelter wrote:
| At least some ISS astronauts describe smelling burnt metal
| after returning from EVA, if memory serves. (Others may smell
| ozone, I've just always remembered hearing burnt metal).
| junon wrote:
| I always heard burnt steak.
| thescriptkiddie wrote:
| the exterior of the ISS is constantly exposed to small mounts
| of atomic oxygen, which is an incredibly strong oxidizer.
| probably in addition to ozone there is a huge variety of
| organic and inorganic oxides that get tracked in through the
| airlock.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materials_International_Space_.
| ..
| sbierwagen wrote:
| Fun trivia (well, perhaps not fun) in the second paragraph:
| "the Long Duration Exposure Facility (LDEF), which was
| retrieved in 1990 after spending 68 months in LEO"
|
| Long exposure, 68 months, right. But it was only supposed
| to be in orbit for 11! Challenger being destroyed on
| reentry made a mess of things.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Duration_Exposure_Facili
| t...
|
| >It was placed in low Earth orbit by Space Shuttle
| Challenger in April 1984. [...] At LDEF's launch, retrieval
| was scheduled for March 19, 1985, eleven months after
| deployment.[4] Schedules slipped, postponing the retrieval
| mission first to 1986, then indefinitely due to the
| Challenger disaster. After 5.7 years its orbit had decayed
| to about 175 nautical miles (324 km) and it was likely to
| burn up on reentry in a little over a month.[6][9]: 15
| imzadi wrote:
| Challenger was destroyed on launch, not reentry.
| jordanb wrote:
| There was some concern when Apollo 11 landed that when they
| repressurized the LEM with moon dust samples inside it would
| start a fire. I think they had a small test article that they
| blew a small stream of oxygen over to ensure it wouldn't auto-
| ignite.
| hvs wrote:
| If you want to get depressed about all the problems with trying
| to colonize Mars, I recommend A City on Mars:
| https://www.acityonmars.com/
|
| It's by the cartoonist of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal and
| his wife (the one with an actual science PhD). https://www.smbc-
| comics.com/
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _If you want to get depressed about all the problems with
| trying to colonize Mars_
|
| I had the opposite reaction. I thought it set forward a
| realistic set of challenges we have to solve and experiments we
| have to do before building anything more than a research
| outpost on Mars. That, in turn, makes a permanent Moon base
| more valuable.
|
| Standout problems were low- and zero-g trauma medicine,
| plumbing (something Artemis II started working on) and
| mammalian reproduction.
| lucasaug wrote:
| When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade
| Patrick_Devine wrote:
| Isn't this why NASA is developing the Electrodynamic Dust Shield
| [1] system?
|
| [1] https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/nasas-dust-shield-
| success...
| tillinghast wrote:
| Cue Cave Johnson: "The bean counters told me we literally could
| not afford to buy seven dollars worth of moon rocks, much less
| seventy million. Bought 'em anyway. Ground 'em up, mixed em into
| a gel. And guess what? Ground up moon rocks are pure poison. I am
| deathly ill."
| mirekrusin wrote:
| Sounds similar to asbestos.
| mncharity wrote:
| > "I think one of the most aggravating, restricting facets of
| lunar surface exploration is the dust and its adherence to
| everything no matter what kind of material, whether it be skin,
| suit material, metal, no matter what it be and its restrictive,
| friction-like action to everything it gets on [...] the simple
| large-tolerance mechanical devices on the Rover began to show the
| effect of dust as the EVAs went on. By the middle or the end of
| the third EVA, simple things like bag locks and the lock which
| held the pallet on the Rover began not only to malfunction but to
| not function at all. They effectively froze. We tried to dust
| them and bang the dust off and clean them, and there was just no
| way. The effect of dust on mirrors, cameras, and checklists is
| phenomenal. You have to live with it but you're continually
| fighting the dust problem both outside and inside the spacecraft.
| Once you get inside the spacecraft, as much as you dust yourself,
| you start taking off the suits and you have dust on your hands
| and your face and you're walking in it. You can be as careful in
| cleaning up as you want to, but it just sort of inhabits every
| nook and cranny in the spacecraft and every pore in your skin
| [...]" Eugene Cernan, Apollo 17 debrief[1]
|
| An interactive microscope of regolith.[2] Like tiny broken glass,
| hard as rock, and sticking to everything like static-charged
| packing peanuts.
|
| An old tech memo and paper.[3][4]
|
| [1]
| https://an.rsl.wustl.edu/apollo/data/A17/resources/a17-techd...
| page "27-28" 258, 50 in pdf. Lots of other mentions of dust. [2]
| interactive microscope of regolith
| https://virtualmicroscope.org/sites/default/files/html5Asset...
| [3] The Effects of Lunar Dust on EVA Systems During the Apollo
| Missions
| https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20050160460/downloads/20...
| [4] IMPACT OF DUST ON LUNAR EXPLORATION
| https://adsabs.harvard.edu/pdf/2007ESASP.643..239S
| alex_be wrote:
| "In addition the Moon has no atmosphere and is constantly
| bombarded by radiation from the Sun that causes the soil to
| become electrostatically charged." - You can use a magnetic or
| electric field to push the soil away
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