The biggest environmental problem facing astronauts on the Moon isn’t the vacuum, the radiation, or the temperature extremes. It’s dust.
For one, some of the dust particles are only a few microns wide. This makes it easy for the particles to get deep into the lungs and stay there. Scientists worry that this could eventually lead to fatal lung diseases similar to silicosis.
Also, the dust is littered with bonded shards of glass and minerals known as agglutinates, which were formed in the heat of meteorite impacts. Agglutinates have not been found on Earth, and scientists worry that the human body may not be able to expel them efficiently if inhaled.
“They have sharp angles, with arms that stick out and little hooks,” said David McKay, chief scientist for astrobiology at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. “It’s like Velcro.”
And it’s not like you can just brush your feet off.
Lunar dust is extremely abrasive — and unavoidable — as astronauts quickly learned during the Apollo missions of the 1960s and ’70s. Within hours, the dust covered the astronauts’ spacesuits and equipment, scratching lenses and corroding seals.
Fortunately for the astronauts, their contact with lunar dust was short enough that it didn’t cause any major problems. But explorers living on a moon base for weeks or even months at a time are not likely to get away so clean.
[…] The Apollo astronauts couldn’t help but get covered in the stuff as they struggled to stay upright on the moon’s surface, where the force of gravity is one-sixth of that on Earth. Later, they tracked the dust back into their space capsules and inhaled it when they took off their helmets.
“When you go weightless again, it shook up from the floorboards,” said Schmitt. “It smelled like spent gunpowder.”
(via GeekPress)