By the time that happens, perhaps around 2018, planners hope to have resolved some key unknowns: whether there are ice deposits at one of the lunar poles, whether a space suit can be made that can survive multiple journeys across the dust-­ridden landscape, and whether the human body can survive dust, lengthy stays in reduced gravity, and prolonged exposure to cosmic radiation. This result has tremendous implications. A day on the Moon lasts 27 Earth days. But there is a fundamental question NASA must answer: Can a human body survive the 34 million-mile (55 million-kilometer) voyage to the red planet? “Here you have geological processes that tend to sort and separate,” says geologist Douglas Rickman of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. They’ve found that one of the biggest challenges to lunar settlement—as vexing as new rocketry or radiation—is how to live with regolith that covers virtually the entire lunar surface from a depth of7 feet to perhaps 100 feet or more. Heavy machinery on Earth depends on friction and gravity to provide a stable underpinning while the machine’s business end cuts, pushes, pulls,digs, scrapes, or pounds. There could be more than a thousand days in one year! A lunar regolith mover will be “about the size of a riding lawn mower,” Boles says. Things are different now. Nobody knows. There was a problem. Elon Musk’s Space X claims to be aiming for a crewed trip to Mars in the same year. The drums lower and begin to rotate.The cups scoop up sand and feed it into a hopper on the back of the robot’s platform. Sebaceous cysts. Space engineers are still debating whether to have astronauts don overalls for dirty work or to build a “dust porch” where astronauts can clean up before entering their living quarters. October 18, 2018 by Russell Lee The U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Agency has unveiled an ambitious plan to send humans to the moon and Mars within the next two decades. Without the moon, a day on earth would only last six to twelve hours. What he is doing in Lockheed’s labs south of Denver “is not an experiment,” he says. Severe farsightedness. During the Apollo missions between 1969 and 1972, 12 American spacemen set foot on the moon, and hauled back a whopping 842 pounds of rock and soil samples. Once unmanned missions establish the beginnings of a base, humans can launch to the lunar surface to conduct research and maintain the habitat. Some scientists think humans could survive comfortably on the moon. More details of this plan emerged last December at a meeting of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics in Houston. Boles suggests getting rid of the blade altogether and mounting a brush or a construction sweeper that would use less force and skim the regolith one thin layer at a time. Space station astronauts are in low Earth orbit, only 224 miles from safety. Currently no one knows how much there is or what form it takes.Some scientists suspect that a comet may have sideswiped the moon long ago, leaving water ice buried in permanently shadowed craters.Identifying the source of the hydrogen is a key goal for the robotic missions that will precede the next landing by humans. So, all of your high-tech equipment, all of your food, any kind of specialized needs — clothing, things like that — for the inhabitants would be brought from Earth.". Setting up a permanent outpost on the moon would, in many respects,be more daunting than putting an outpost on Mars. Wait a minute, can humans really survive the trip to Mars? "They would not be imported from the Earth, but everything else would be. To pull it off, we first need to solve a lot of problems. It operates at relatively cool temperatures, 1300 to 1500 degrees F. The disadvantage is that it obtains oxygen almost exclusively from iron oxides, which make up just about 10 percent of the regolith. “They found moondust in every nook and cranny,” says William Larson of the Kennedy Space Center, a lead scientist and program manager in NASA’s efforts to develop techniques for using lunar resources. If the base were built at the lunar equator, it would be in darkness for half of every month. During the Apollo missions, three days of abbreviated moonwalks was about the limit before zippers balked, joints stiffened, and connectors began to clog. Those samples revealed that the moon’s makeup is similar to Earth’s. President Bush's recent proposal to focus NASA's efforts on manned space exploration has rekindled efforts to define the human limits on long voyages in deep space. Taylor found he could melt a pile of lunar soil in 10 to 20 seconds.Then he focused a single magnetron on another sample: “With 50 watts of energy I took a one-centimeter block of lunar soil to 1700 degrees Celsius (3100 degrees F) in 10 seconds,” he says. NASA’s current plans call for a series of “precursor” robotic lunar missions to test technologies and gather information. “NASA wants us to lookat making 8 metric tons [9 tons] of oxygen per year,” Clark says.“That’s 44 kilograms [97 pounds] per day during daylight. In My Humble Opinion (IMHO) Jackknifed_Juggernaut January 22, 2015, 10:41pm #1. Europa’s magnetic field shields its surface from Jupiter’s deadly radiation. “We’re taking it to the next level.”. When moon dust is disturbed, small particles float about, land, and glue themselves to everything.Regolith does not brush off easily, and breathing it can cause pulmonary fibrosis, the lunar equivalent of black lung. 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