A brand new type of moon spacesuit fabric could “repel lunar dust on demand” for astronaut missions, says the team behind the design.
The flexible, stretchable moon fabric prototype is under development at Hawai’i Pacific University (HPU) and just got fueled by a $50,000 grant from NASA. The fabric can be built to make use of electrostatic forces that may keep corrosive moon dust away, thereby stopping the sharp particles from damaging spacesuits.
The brand new technology is known as LiqMEST (Liquid Metal Electrostatic Protective Textile) and goals to beat the dusty problems NASA’s Apollo astronauts struggled with within the Nineteen Sixties and Nineteen Seventies. The sharp dust quickly corroded surfaces like rover dust shields, caked the spacesuits of astronauts and usually clung to the whole lot, making even three-day sorties a challenge.
And the necessity is urgent: NASA plans to land astronauts on the surface of the moon once more in 2025 or 2026 with its Artemis program. That timeline not only depends upon the progress of Artemis 2‘s crewed round-the-moon flight planned for 2024, but additionally Artemis 3‘s lander and spacesuit development. (Artemis 3 is the stage of this system that’ll bring a crew to the lunar surface.)
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While keeping dust off spacesuits, HPU’s latest fabric technology is anticipated to also allow astronauts flexibility in rugged conditions. But the main draw, the team says, is the fabric’s repellent properties.
“When activated, it generates an electrical field that repels lunar dust, stopping the dust from adhering,” Arif Rahman, an HPU assistant engineering professor who led the grant proposal, said in a press release. “This strategy could be applied each to spacesuits and fabric covers for lunar equipment during moon missions.”
Rahman goals to construct a prototype using the funding he received from NASA’s Minority University Research and Education Project (MURAP). The $50,000 grant got here courtesy of the MUREP Partnership Annual Notification that “connects minority serving institutions … with NASA mission directorates and promotes research collaboration,” in line with an agency website.
Should the whole lot go to plan, Rahman plans to submit a brand new grant proposal to NASA, eventually aiming for space use. (NASA has a set of technology readiness levels that latest products must pass before being certified for space, in a process typically taking years in any case.)
NASA has also been studying the lunar dust problem for many years, including through the Lunar Surface Innovation Initiative established in 2019. Agency officials say dust mitigation is one among six fundamental challenges that must be addressed for long-term astronaut habitats on the moon.
HPU’s electrostatic tech is not the only example being tested. NASA has also space-tested a material variant on the outside of the International Space Station through a project series called MISSE, or the Materials International Space Station Experiment. The experiments test materials in harsh orbital conditions for months at a time, in a vacuum and with high radiation from the sun.
A team at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC) launched an electrodynamic dust shield to the ISS with MISSE-11. It was the primary test within the series that explored dust-repelling tech in space. The shield showed promise: ground tests before flight suggested electrodes on glass could remove “greater than 98% of dust under high vacuum conditions,” in line with a short publication by the team for the Lunar Dust Workshop in February 2020, hosted by the Universities Space Research Association in Houston.
Evaluation on the KSC shield appears to be ongoing. Results from MISSE-11 should not available on NASA’s ISS experiment website. A follow-up mission including the shield, called MISSE-15, launched in 2021 and results are also not posted yet.