HR: 0800h
AN: SH51B-0275    [Abstracts]
TI: Impact of Lunar Dust on the Exploration Initiative
AU: * Stubbs, T J
EM: Timothy.J.Stubbs@gsfc.nasa.gov
AF: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Mail code 690.4, Greenbelt, MD 20771 United States
AU: Vondrak, R R
EM: Richard.R.Vondrak@nasa.gov
AF: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Mail code 690, Greenbelt, MD 20771 United States
AU: Farrell, W M
EM: William.Farrell@gsfc.nasa.gov
AF: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Mail code 695, Greenbelt, MD 20771 United States
AB: From the Apollo era it is known that dust grains on the Moon can cause serious problems for exploration activities. Such problems include adhering to clothing and equipment, reducing external visibility on landings, and causing difficulty to breathing and vision within the spacecraft. An important step in dealing with dust-related problems is to understand how dust grains behave in the lunar environment. The electrostatic charging of dust grains and the lunar surface by interaction with the local plasma environment and the photoemission of electrons due to solar UV and X-rays is a likely cause of some of these problems. It can also act as a mechanism for transporting dust away from the surface, as the like-charged surface and dust act to repel each other. There is much evidence to suggest that sunlight scattered at the terminators, as observed by surface landers and astronauts in orbit, is caused by "dust clouds" composed of $\sim$0.1 \mum grains at altitudes of $\sim$1-100 km. In order to explain these observations, we propose a dynamic "fountain" model in which charged dust grains follow ballistic trajectories, subsequent to being accelerated upwards through a narrow sheath region by the surface electric field. These dust grains could affect the optical quality of the lunar environment for astronomical observations and interfere with exploration activities.
DE: 6025 Interactions with solar wind plasma and fields
DE: 6213 Dust
DE: 6250 Moon (1221)
SC: SPA-Solar and Heliospheric Physics [SH]
MN: 2004 AGU Fall Meeting