The report is due tomorrow
The report is due tomorrow. intering in the cold vacuum of space so instead some scientists have proposed using microwaves to heat up the regolith instead microwaves can penetrate much deeper into the surface and can heat up the regolith faster and more evenly and it’s a technology that’s already been tested on Earth in a laboratory setting
Thanks to Lenode for supporting this SciShow video! That link gives you a 100-60 day credit on a new Lenode account. When humans eventually get back to the Moon, they’re going to run into a few familiar challenges: there’s the low gravity which makes everyone skip around like school children and the non-existent atmosphere, but the peskiest problem might just be all the dust. Dust clogs space suits and sandblasts other equipment, and it’s a huge threat to the safety and success of any lunar mission.
But while scientists can’t do much about the Moon’s gravity or air, they actually have a solution for the dust. And it involves microwaving the lunar surface. Moon dust, technically known as lunar regolith, is the ugly craft glitter of the solar system. It gets everywhere and scratches everything up, and it doesn’t even add a little sparkle to your day. It got that way because the Moon’s surface has spent the past few billion years being broken up by countless micrometeorite impacts, that made the regolith particles very fine, very rough, and very difficult to pack down. Plus, with the Moon’s low gravity and lack of atmosphere, they’re super easy to kick up, and once they are, it’ll be a long time before they fall back to the ground. During the Apollo missions, regolith clouds completely obscured landing sites and ruined some equipment.
So, with national space agencies and private companies eager to get humans back to the Moon and eager to build up permanent bases there, they’ve got to figure out a way to stop kicking up dust with every rocket launch or landing, or with every jaunt in a lunar golf cart. One obvious solution is to construct a more solid base of operations, build stuff like landing paths, roadways, and other structures that can protect more delicate equipment. And on Earth, materials like steel and concrete are our cheap, easy go-to’s, but shipping those ingredients all the way to the Moon is ridiculously expensive. Like, right now, it costs around 1 million dollars to get a kilogram of stuff from Earth onto the lunar surface, giving your average landing pad a sticker price of oh, a trillion dollars or so.
So, instead, scientists have been looking to kill two birds with one stone: cut costs by using a building material that’s already on the Moon and get rid of that moon dust by using it as that building material. And they want to do this by beaming a bunch of microwaves into the Moon’s surface and sintering the regolith. Sintering might not be something that you hear about all the time, but I can almost guarantee that you have something sintered in your home right now. The technique takes powdered minerals or metals and heats them up just enough so that they don’t melt, but the edges of the grains are gooey enough to fuse together. In fact, that’s what’s going on inside a pottery kiln whenever you fire ceramics. All those teeny tiny wet clay particles are heated up using high intensities of infrared radiation until they fuse into one big solid coffee mug.
By using different minerals, sintering can create some incredibly hearty stuff. For example, the ceramic silicon carbide can be found inside turbines and jet engines, and it just so happens that the Moon’s regolith contains some great stuff for sintering, like silicates and small amounts of iron. But if we tried to heat it up in a large lunar kiln, it would take a lot of time and use up a lot of our energy resources. Some scientists have proposed using lenses to concentrate the infrared radiation coming from the Sun, but it would still limit how effective the sintering would be. See, infrared rays don’t penetrate very far into the surface of whatever they’re heating up; they only reach a depth of about six millimeters. So a several centimeter thick structure sturdy enough to drive a lunar rover on or land a rocket on would need to be built up in successive layers, and that comes with its own risks. The layers could flake away from each other or could crack.
With sintering in the cold vacuum of space, so instead some scientists have proposed using microwaves to heat up the regolith instead. Microwaves can penetrate much deeper into the surface and can heat up the regolith faster and more evenly. And it’s a technology that’s already been tested on Earth in a laboratory setting.