Several countries have announced plans to explore the moon, and this raises a very important question: how to deal with moon dust? John Young, who commanded Apollo 16, believes that "dust is the main obstacle to returning to the moon." The chief lunar dust specialist lives in Australia. He became it almost by accident, and now he is consulted not only at NASA, but also in China.
In the mass consciousness, American astronauts who landed on the moon five decades ago appear to be square-jawed superheroes who simply cannot do something trivial like cleaning. In fact, they were obsessed with her. Every time they returned to the Apollo Lunar Module after a walk on the Moon, they were amazed at how much dust they brought with them and how difficult it was to get rid of it. It was not just earthly filth; it was unusually sticky and abrasive, scratched the faceplates of astronauts' helmets, weakened the seams of spacesuits, irritated the eyes, and caused sinusitis in some of them. "It seems to settle in every corner, in every crack of the spacecraft and in every pore of your skin," said Gene Cernan of Apollo 17 in his report after returning from a flight.
During each of the six moon landings, the so-called "Dust Dozen" fought valiantly against their adversary. They dusted off their shoes outside and then wrapped garbage bags around their feet to keep dust from getting inside. They attacked her with wet rags, brushes and a low power vacuum cleaner, and Pete Conrad of Apollo 12 called it "just mockery." (He eventually stripped naked and tucked his blackened suit into a bag.) Cernan, returning from his last walk on the moon, vowed, “When we leave here, I will no longer dust off. Never in my life". In the end, NASA was never able to find a reliable solution to the problem. Years have passed since John Young commanded Apollo 16, and he still believes that "dust is the main obstacle to getting back to the moon."
Now that national space agencies and private corporations are preparing for this step, the Apollo business journals are back again. In January, China installed its Chang'e-4 probe on the opposite side of the Moon - thus systematically moving towards its goal: the construction of a lunar research station. Two months later, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency announced it would develop a six-wheeled lunar rover by 2029 in partnership with Toyota. Around this time, Vice President Mike Pence announced America's plans to send humans to the moon by 2024. According to NASA Director Jim Bridenstine, the goal is to “settle. Stay. With landing modules, robots, all-terrain vehicles - and people. India and Russia also have missions planned. In addition, there are private businesses such as the Moon Express, whose Harvest Moon expedition will search for water, minerals and other resources to mine. All this raises a very important question: how to deal with this nasty dust? An Australian physicist named Brian O'Brien can provide the answer.
O'Brien became Earth's chief expert on moon dust almost by accident. In 1964, five years before Apollo 11 landed in the Sea of Tranquility, he was a slender, up-and-coming young professor of space science at Rice University in Houston, specializing in radiation studies. This was at an early stage of training in the framework of the Apollo project, when the astronauts were undergoing educational programs in a variety of subjects - vector calculus, antenna theory, physiology of the human nose. O'Brien's task was to teach them about the Van Allen Belts, two regions of intense radiation that surround the planet like a pair of inflatable pool rings. He recalls the 1964 Apollo class, which included Eugene Cernan and Buzz Aldrin,as the most "disciplined and attentive" group of students with whom he had to work.
In preparation for the Apollo 11 launch, O'Brien convinced NASA to bring some additional equipment on board. It was a small box the size of a bar of soap, the main task of which was to measure how much dust accumulated on the surface of the moon. O'Brien says it was a "walking, remarkably minimalist" device. He sketched a blueprint on the back of a glass stand on a flight from Los Angeles to Houston, and refined it on a cocktail napkin. The so-called Dust Detector Experiment, or DDE for short, was probably the least impressive of all the scientific equipment aboard Apollo 11; NASA didn't even bother to mention it in press releases. But he did his job so wellthat the agency has included modified models of the primary EDP in all subsequent flights of the Apollo program. Four of them are still in place and hold the record for the longest operating experiment on the Moon to this day.
For many years, it was believed that the data that the first instruments sent to Earth did not reach or were lost. Ever since they were unexpectedly rediscovered in 2006, inner space circles have gradually begun to realize that O'Brien's humble detectors can tell us much more about moon dust than anyone ever imagined. - except for O'Brien himself, of course. Now 85 years old, he is still full of energy and for half a century has been waiting for the chance to share with the world what he knows about one of the most mysterious substances in the solar system.
O'Brien has always had a soft spot for extreme places. As a teenager, he was engaged in speleotourism and once was imprisoned in the Australian caves of Yarangobilli for three whole days. It was a traumatic experience: his lamp ran out of fuel, and the only sound he heard, according to the note about his rescue published at the time, was the sound of "bats over his head, and under his feet he could feel their tiny skeletons", but this didn't make him forget about going to the caves. A few years later, while exploring the crystal grotto, he met his future wife, Avril Searle.
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By the age of 23, O'Brien received his Ph. D. in physics from the University of Sydney and was appointed deputy chief physicist of the Commonwealth Antarctic Division. He was assigned to the icebreaker Magga Dan and now stood on deck and admired the aurora, pulsing in the sky red, purple and green. This was in 1958, a year after the Russians launched the first Sputnik and the year NASA was founded. O'Brien had a dream: to launch a satellite into orbit to understand how charged protons and electrons create the southern lights. That chance came the following year when James Van Allen, the discoverer of the Allen belts, found him a job at the University of Iowa. Within five months, O'Brien and his students built a satellite from scratch. Other projects followed, and in 1963 O'Brien was offered a position in the new Department of Space Research at Rice University.
It wasn't long since O'Brien and his family moved to Houston, and then he got a call from NASA. The agency had hoped to hire him as an instructor for the astronauts, but also suggested that he think about an experiment that could be done on the moon. He proposed making a device that would measure the energy spectra of charged particles descending onto the lunar surface. Of the 90 applications, only seven received the green light, and one of them was O'Brien's idea. NASA warned that, just in case, the device should have a dust cover, in other words, a special plastic shell. Back then, no one had any idea how unpleasant the moon dust would be, but O'Brien thought that since the agency had taken care of dust covers, it would be good to install a dust detector there as well.
At first, NASA and its private contractors opposed the idea. They believed it would be too difficult to create a detector that was light enough to meet mission specifications and simple enough not to take up the already limited time and attention of astronauts. On the moon, distractions can be deadly. O'Brien considered their resistance to be "damn stupid," and drew a blueprint right on this cocktail napkin to allay their fears. It consisted of three tiny solar cells mounted on a box that was painted white to reflect sunlight. As dust settles on the cells, their power output drops, ensuring that deposits are clearly recorded over time. O'Brien added some temperature sensors,and brought the total weight of the experimental device to a dainty 10 ounces (283 grams). The EAF was so small that it could be attached to a seismometer that Aldrin and Neil Armstrong had to install to measure lunar earthquakes. Hearing all this, NASA relented: the EPF could go to the moon. Once there, he will transmit his data to a seismometer, which, in turn, will send the readings to Earth using an antenna. They will be stored on reels of magnetic tape for later analysis.it will transmit its data to a seismometer, which, in turn, will send the readings to Earth using an antenna. They will be stored on reels of magnetic tape for later analysis.it will transmit its data to a seismometer, which, in turn, will send the readings to Earth using an antenna. They will be stored on reels of magnetic tape for later analysis.
O'Brien, Avril and their three children returned to Sydney in 1968, so he arranged for these tapes to be sent to him. Now he cannot remember where he was on the morning of late July 1969 when the crew of the Apollo 11 lunar module landed on the moon. He may have heard news from Australian news agencies on the radio, which was passed between different conversations. And yet he remembers perfectly well the moment when Aldrin said that the module was "throwing up dust" when it landed, as well as the observation of Armstrong, who said that just before leaving the stairs, he saw the surface, and it was "almost like a powder. " O'Brien's heart sank with excitement: his EDP may well justify itself.
As it turned out, the seismometer suddenly overheated shortly after Apollo 11 left the moon. (Before he stopped working, O'Brien says, he recorded the astronauts' footsteps on the stairs and the “gurgle of fuel.”) But the EDS continued to serve and quickly identified the damage the dust could have caused. Almost immediately after the lunar module took off, two of the detector's three solar cells registered a sudden drop in power, one of them by 18%. This was accompanied by a jump in temperature. O'Brien saw the only logical explanation: the EHP was covered with dust, which, like a light-insulating curtain, trapped light and heat inside. It seemed obvious to him that the seismometer had suffered the same fate.
O'Brien concluded that if NASA hopes that the instruments installed on the moon will work in future Apollo missions, then the issue of dust settling will need to be carefully studied. In August of that year, he proudly wrote to his Australian colleague that "EDP may have really justified his trip!" But his American counterparts, especially the technicians at the Manned Spacecraft Center, weren't as thrilled. Some of them, in his opinion, were less interested in the search for scientific knowledge than in the soonest American landing on the moon. Eventually the seismometer stopped receiving commands from the flight control and the entire experiment, including the EAF, was shut down after 21 days.
In October, NASA released its preliminary scientific report on Apollo 11. It largely rejected O'Brien's explanations for the EHF readings, attributing the unexpectedly low solar cell output to calibration errors. (This was covered in a chapter that was co-authored with O'Brien, but he says he "strongly disagrees" with the findings and never gave permission to use his name.) O'Brien again tried to argue his position in the journal The Journal of Atmospheric Physics, using one of Australia's first supercomputers, SILLIAC, to process and print data onto endless ribbons of paper. The article went unnoticed, and hardly any of the researchers in the following decades quoted it.
O'Brien was forced to admit defeat in the first round of the moon dust war. He decided to change his business and became the first head of the Western Australian Environmental Protection Agency. The job had to be in Perth, and when Avril was about to take the three-day train journey from Sydney, she took the kids and 172 coils of EDP with her. O'Brien asked a colleague at a local university to put the tapes in storage. And so it happened that they stayed there for more than forty years.
After the final landing of the Apollo Project in 1972, NASA had almost lost interest in the Moon. It was necessary to collect space stations, explore distant planets - and there was not so much money. Then, in 2004, President George W. Bush announced the launch of what would become the Constellation Program. These will be powerful new rockets, improved crew capsules and roomy lunar modules - "Apollo on steroids," as one NASA executive put it. Part of the plan was to establish a permanent base on the moon, which meant renewed interest in organizing regular landings and long-term settlements.
These are the interests of Philip Metzger, the planetary scientist. Metzger co-founded Swamp Works, a technology research greenhouse at NASA's Kennedy Space Center that develops practical solutions to the challenges of work and life beyond Earth. As part of his dissertation, he conducted research on how to prevent the erupting combustion products of rocket fuel from stirring up dust and damaging the lunar infrastructure, and for decades examined rock and soil samples obtained by the Apollo astronauts. He even had four rare vessels with real moon dust in his laboratory. Over the years, he has prepared an educational program on lunar geology for his team.
This is roughly what he said: regolith, a rocky sediment on the surface of the primary, bedrock lunar rock, is a mixture of dust, gravel and pebbles. It is believed to be about 15 feet (4.5 meters) thick in the plains and 30 feet (9 meters) thick in the mountains. There is practically no atmosphere and magnetic field on the Moon, so the uppermost regolith layer is sensitive to space weather. It is constantly bombarded by cosmic rays and the solar wind, so dust particles can become electrified, like a balloon rubbed against your hair. Micrometeorite hail is also constantly falling on it.
When micrometeorites fall, they create small shock waves in the soil layer, and it partially melts or evaporates. The molten soil scatters in splashes, but immediately solidifies again, forming small pieces of glass. According to Metzger, these pieces of glass are "very bizarre, sharp, jagged, and very conducive to friction." On Earth, they would be smoothed by water and wind, but here they remain so forever. (When Aldrin and Armstrong planted the American flag near the landing site, they barely stuck the pole into the regolith, they were hindered by glass, which was there a lot. "We could only install it together, so the PR campaign almost failed," he recalled Aldrin many years later.) Thanks to the constant bombardment by meteorites, the soil particles also became incredibly small and therefore sticky. Metzger compares them to "hairs on a gecko's feet, which allow it to walk up steep walls."
At the end of a geology class, Metzger would give a short sobering list of health complications. Our bodies get rid of most of the irritating substances every day when we sneeze or cough. But anything less than 10 microns, about one-seventh the diameter of a human hair, settles in the lungs. In the soil samples brought back by Apollo 17, some of the dust particles are even less than two microns: small, like particles of flour. Unsurprisingly, the astronauts suffered from what Jack Schmitt, a member of the Apollo 17 crew, called "lunar hay fever." [As Australian researcher Alice Gorman notes in her book Dr. Space Junk vs. the Universe, the fear of moon dust pollution has reached even West Africa, where people began to call the new one,severe conjunctivitis with Apollo's disease.]
For all Metzger's knowledge of moon dust, there was one mystery that haunted him. His laboratory at Kennedy Space Center had several pieces of an old spacecraft called Surveyor 3. Between 1966 and 1968, five Surveyor probes were installed on the Moon, which convincingly showed that the regolith was hard enough to land and allay any fears that astronauts might get stuck up to their chins in the moon's quicksand. (A photograph of Aldrin's footprint on the lunar surface - one of the most famous images in human history - was actually taken to study the "crushing strength of the lunar surface." ",and the astronauts were ordered to bring parts of it home for examination. One of them, Alan Bean, then noticed that over two and a half years on the moon, the bright white surface of the probe had acquired a yellowish brown color.
At first, the researchers assumed that this was due to damage from solar radiation, but in 2011 Metzger and his colleagues proved that "in fact it was ultra-fine dust that eaten into the micro-texture of the paint." However, the bigger question was how the dust got there. Since Surveyor 3 landed in the moon's near-vacuum, exhaust fumes from its engine should have pushed dust away from the spacecraft. Metzger's team couldn't explain it.
By this time, the Constellation program was closed. Building new missiles was over budget and behind schedule, and the Obama administration decided that this headache was best left to the private sector; NASA's programs should be more modest and limited mainly to scientific research. Metzger began to receive information about a number of companies seeking to launch rockets to the moon. Many participated in the Google-sponsored Lunar XPrize, which pledged $ 20 million to the first team to land a robotic spacecraft on the moon, move it a short distance, and transmit images back to Earth. (Previously, no one succeeded.) Increasingly worried about how all the incoming traffic - and the dust that it will raise,- could affect the Apollo landing sites, Metzger helped put together a set of official NASA lunar heritage guidelines, recommending a two-kilometer exclusion zone around them. (This is an arbitrary number, he says; due to the way moon dust behaves when disturbed, there may actually be no “safe distance”.)
A few years later, Metzger retired early from NASA and took a job in the planetary science department at the University of Central Florida. His latest project at Swamp Works was to come up with ways to combat moon dust - including using magnets, reusable filters, artificial electrostatic charges to keep dust from sticking to surfaces and crumbling, and air showers or brushes "to clean the suits. When he was at NASA, Metzger said, even though the agency had no immediate plans to locate an American lunar base, "everyone came to the consensus that the biggest problem for the lunar operation was dust."
In 2015, when Metzger long ago gave up trying to solve the mystery of the Surveyor 3 dust deposit, he heard about a series of recently published works by Brian O'Brien. They had a really wonderful theory of moon dust. Reading the papers, Metzger realized that this was the first acceptable explanation for the puzzle. And, surprisingly, it was based on data from the original EDP tapes.
O'Brien returned to the lunar theme in much the same way as he first began to study it - thanks to a happy coincidence. In 2006, when he was in his 70s, one of his friends mentioned that he had read something on the NASA website about the deplorable state of some of the Apollo tape archives. O'Brien decided to track down the coils that he had given for safekeeping to his colleague many years ago. They found themselves in the room under the seats of the classroom at Curtin University in Perth. They were covered (how could it be otherwise?) Dust, but all 172 survived, and each had about 2,500 feet (760 meters) of tape. The only problem was that they were in such an outdated format that O'Brien could not decrypt the data. He sent an email to NASA, offering to pick up the recordings, but the agency responded with a polite refusal.
A local radio journalist heard about the discovery and told the story on the radio. The news reached Guy Holmes, an American physicist who lived in Perth for many years and founded SpectrumData, a company that specialized in digitizing large amounts of data from older tape formats. Holmes called O'Brien and offered free help. He said he would keep the tapes in a climate-controlled storage facility until he found the right equipment to decrypt them. O'Brien gratefully agreed.
Even if Holmes succeeded in trying to decipher, O'Brien wasn't sure he would ever find funding - from NASA or anyone else - to reanalyze the data. But he felt that this was the last chance to dot the i's on moon dust and finally get rid of the frustrations of his early career. So he got to work, going back to his old SILLIAC data analysis and paper printouts, deciding to publish a peer-reviewed paper. It appeared in 2009, almost 40 years after the release of his original work on moon dust.
O'Brien's dramatic story - how he rediscovered tapes at a ripe old age and how his role in the Apollo program was forgotten - attracted media attention. And, as soon as he began to talk about the strange properties of moon dust, he was completely in her power.
O'Brien returned to the EDS data that flew the Apollo 12. This detector was different from its predecessor: it had one horizontal solar cell on top and two vertical ones on the sides. They were covered in dust as the astronauts bounced along the lunar paths and then partially cleared when the lunar module took off. It is curious that one of the vertical elements became completely clean overnight. O'Brien explained this by the fact that the electrostatic charge of the dust - the main reason for its stickiness - changes during a long lunar day. When the sun is high and the ultraviolet light is at its peak, the dust gets charged and becomes very sticky. When the sun goes down, the dust seems to lose some of its traction. If Charles Conrad had been to the moon at sunset, he might have been able to vacuum his suit.
Less than two months after the article was published, O'Brien became a freelance professor at the University of Western Australia. He was invited to speak at NASA's second annual Lunar Science Forum at the Ames Research Center in California. At the time of his presentation, the room was overcrowded, so some were standing in the corridor. Younger lunar enthusiasts were initially hesitant, as they had never heard of O'Brien or his EDP. “After that, things started to boil,” he said.
With joy, O'Brien - let's use this expression once - was ready to jump above the moon. Senior student Monique Hollick, now a space technology engineer at the Australian Department of Defense, helped him analyze the recovered data. It took several years. By 2015, they were ready to talk about an even more unusual theory of lunar dust.
O'Brien has already explained how the Apollo 12 EDP got clean; what he could not explain was how he got covered in dust again after the astronauts left. His and Hollick's hypothesis was this: after the astronauts set off on their return trip, leaving the EPD to broadcast readings, the sun went down for two Earth weeks. When it rose again, it flooded the "side dust" which they had raised - over two tons - with ultraviolet radiation. This gave the particles a positive charge. According to O'Brien, they began to "resent and mix" like a "dusty whirlwind." Pushing off each other and from the surface of the moon, they floated above the surface. The dust flew high enough to reach the EAF. The next time the sun rose, the same thing happened, and then it happened again and again. Each time the storm grew smaller and smaller, until finally there was no side dust left for the storm to reappear.
This is still a somewhat controversial theory. Schmitt, an astronaut-geologist who flew Apollo 17, is not entirely convincing because most of the rocks he saw on the moon were not covered in dust. "If this fine suspension rose and moved somewhere to the side," he wrote to me, "one would not expect the surface of the stones to be clean." In his correspondence with Schmitt, O'Brien suggested that when the angle of incidence of the sun's rays changed, a layer of dust rolled off these stones.
The controversy continues. Other researchers have argued for the option of a dust cloud tens or even hundreds of kilometers above the lunar surface, although NASA's Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer, launched in 2013, did not find much a lot of evidence for this. There are more bizarre assumptions, for example, the idea that lunar dust in its undisturbed state can collect in fragile porous structures, the so-called fairy castles. “We don't know the whole truth until we get there,” says Metzger. However, his instinct tells him that O'Brien is right, and that his theory once and for all solves the riddle of Surveyor III. Anyone planning a flight to the moon, he says,must prepare for dust storms at every sunrise around any point of high activity and varying degrees of dust stickiness during a lunar day.
As various countries and companies seek to organize missions in the most convenient locations on the moon - mainly at the lunar poles, where there is supposedly a lot of water in the form of ice - life there can quickly turn into dusty chaos, amid which conflicts between people will be brewing. … The Hague International Space Management Working Group has already begun developing recommendations on lunar "safety zones" and "priority rights". Perhaps they should include a provision on housekeeping.
On the wall of O'Brien's garage in Perth hangs an autographed photograph of the Apollo astronaut training group from 1964. Buzz Aldrin and Eugene Cernan smile from the bottom row, graceful though faded, in suits and ties. Next to the group portrait is a photograph of O'Brien with Cernan during the latter's visit to Perth in 2016, a year before his death. “We both look a little different than when I lectured him,” O'Brien said as I walked into his house on a warm February afternoon. I asked what they were talking about. "About moon dust," he chuckled.
O'Brien was preparing to travel to Texas for a NASA conference called Microsymposium 60: Forward to the Moon to Stay. He was going to travel alone; his beloved wife died in 2017, and Holmes, who accompanied him on a recent visit to Beijing, was unable to travel with him this time. O'Brien was worried about how he would be able to remove the compression stockings on his own after the flight, but does not seem to be intimidated by the idea of speaking in front of two hundred people, including representatives of all nine American companies recently commissioned by NASA to deliver payloads to the moon. He hinted that he was in talks with several of them, and mysteriously added, "I'm looking forward to seeing a lot more dust detectors."
On the shelves of O'Brien's office are various space mementos of the greatest interest. I looked at life-size models of various dust detectors with plaques indicating which Apollo missions they flew. O'Brien happily let me play with the shiny models of the Chinese Chang'e-3 and the Yutu moon rover on the coffee table if I put on white gloves. He received them in Beijing as a gift from the Chinese Academy of Space Technology, which he contacted after suggesting that a dust storm was the reason for the inexplicable stop of Yuytu in 2014, after the first lunar sunrise, and allowed himself to give them advice. so that next time they equip the machine with a dust detector. It looks like Chang'e-3 has made some dust measurements,which the Chinese have confidentially shared with O'Brien; all he can say is that he is “excited” by the results and hopes that they will be published soon.
A few days after O'Brien returned from Texas, I called him and asked how the conference had gone. Moon dust is definitely becoming a trend again, he happily said. Back in 2009, he described his first appearance before the lunar exploration community like this: "I didn't know anyone, and nobody knew me." Almost everyone knew him this time. He admitted that as he wandered through the endless corridors of airports and conference complexes, he was well aware of his advanced age. "But when I left the micro-symposium, and for several weeks after that," he said, "I felt young again."
Ceridwen Dovey is a writer from Sydney. Author of the books Blood Kin, Only the Animals, In the Garden of the Fugitives, and On JM Coetzee: Writers about Writers: Writers on Writers)