To stay safe on Mars and the moon, we may need to measure dust
Spacecraft landing on dusty places like the moon and Mars tend to kick up dusty regolith that obscures the lenses of navigation cameras, reducing visibility and making the already difficult task of landing difficult. safely be heavier. A new instrument that accurately maps the amount of dust and debris in its vicinity may prove essential for spacecraft landings. month and Mars.
On the moon, dust particles are particularly dangerous for space crews. A 2005 NASA report on the effects of dust during the Apollo missions notes “one of the strange things about the Apollo experience was how disturbing the lunar dust was. It obscured their view of the landing, procedures closed, braded Extravehicular Mobility Suits (EMS), […] they have irritated their eyes and their lungs, and often cover everything with a strange assurance.”
Dust is also known to play a major role in the climate of Mars, which, along with the moon, has changed strongly. where one goes for site inspection.
Radar Interferometry for Landing Ejecta (RILE), developed by scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, uses radar to generate millimeter waves and catalog time they retreat after being reflected by the flying dust clouds. According to the opinion that these waves would decrease when they see the dust that hits, like the one that is blown into the atmosphere by the smoke of the plane. To estimate the size of those harmful dust particles, researchers compare how long such reflected waves take to travel from a dusty area to an empty one, according to study to describe the tool.
Related: Big Mars Dust Storm Won’t Stop NASA’s Next Lander
The device could be placed between the spacecraft’s legs or used during descent to collect accurate data before it falls, the researchers said.
Study leader Nicolas Rasmont, Ph.D. student in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and his colleagues tested and calibrated the device in a vacuum chamber that mimics space. space. The team used micrometer-sized glass particles in the regolith, reporting that the new device is “well-suited for laboratory and field applications where expensive, fragile, and bulky optical equipment is impractical.” .”
“Other measurement methods exist, but our tool addresses a kind of ‘missing middle,'” Rasmont said. news release. The new device accurately measures dust the clouds too thick for optical measurements, but too thin for other methods that use X-rays, for example, Rasmont added.
Meanwhile, the scientific community has only recently begun to directly observe and measure dust on Mars. At the end of 2022, scientists who are part of the Mars 2020 project studied videos of six spacecraft. a retired Ingenuity robotic helicopter and it is written where the dust has risen and how high the debris has reached. The team compiled the first set of key statistics about the exact conditions needed to lift the dust, including nearby wind conditions, which in turn informed the computer models that guided the experiments. of aircraft ground.
Recent developments in space technology are also helping to solve the problem of raising dust. Earlier this year, scientists from part of India Chandrayaan-3 mission reported aircraft used “powerful engines so far“With a unique diagonal configuration. Because of this, the boat did not kick up any dust during its descent, which allowed its cameras to accurately see the landing area in minutes the last important one before the arrest.
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