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Houston, we've had a problem. We've dust everywhere!

19. December 2009

"Who doesn’t envision to one day be walking on Mars? The troubles involved in getting and staying there should by then hopefully be greatly mitigated. One of the unsolved problems that we would currently encounter on Mars is dust. The Martian dust is highly adhesive to any surface through electrostatic processes – that is, charged micro-particles connecting to a material, such as a spacesuit. Martian dust has the potential to crucially abrade surfaces and threaten human health. Moreover, it is intensely sticky.

dust_stratification.jpg
Due to the strong electrostatic adhesion, the soil at a space suit
cannot be removed by simply brushing it off since such a mechanical act of cleaning would lead to a high abrasion of the material. Another danger takes place if the dust covers the visor of the helmet, for the astronaut’s vision is obscured. This is obviously a risk for the astronaut. Furthermore, the Apollo astronauts reported after their Moon landings that the fine-grained, extraterrestrial dust even affected their health. After extravehicular activities, the astronauts unintentionally carried the adhering dust into the habitat where it gradually spread throughout the rooms and led to respiration problems.
A similar peril is anticipated on Mars explorations.
As an undergraduate student at the University of Innsbruck, I worked together with my advisor, the Chrairman of the Austrian Space Forum, Mag. Gernot Groemer on my Bachelor thesis about dust mitigation on space suits to help solve the dust issues. Based on similar external experiments, we propose a system for the Aouda Space Suit Simulator of the PolAres Research Program that levitates the dust over the surface
and makes them fall to the ground. Beyond dust rejection, the paper also discusses the importance of a biological barrier to impede terrestrial microbes to penetrate the space suits. The promising results of the dust study may lead to the implementation of this system into the Aouda Space Suit Simulator in the future."

PolAres Schedule Update

27. April - 01 May 2012: Field test Austria

After Rio Tinto in April 2011 this will be the first field test after upgrading the Aouda.X space suit simulator. Proposed location: Dachstein cave systems (upper Austria)