Related papers: Lunar Cold Trap Contamination by Landing Vehicles
Multiple nations are planning activity on the Moon's surface, and to deconflict lunar operations we must understand the sandblasting damage from rocket exhaust blowing soil. Prior research disagreed over the scaling of the erosion rate,…
The origin, distribution, depth and volume of lunar volatiles remain open questions. One of the possible sources of Moon's volatiles is their volcanic outgassing during the peak of lunar volcanic activity ~3.5 Ga. This same outgassing would…
Time-limited space missions may miss rare occurrences of very dense clouds of lunar dust. At the same time, the information provided by the Earth-based monitoring of the Moon during at least the last three centuries still remains unused. In…
Context. Airless planetary bodies are directly exposed to solar wind ions, which can scatter or become implanted upon impact with the regolith-covered surface, while also sputtering surface atoms. Aims. We construct a semi-analytical model…
A mathematical model and software implementation developed to predict trajectories of single lunar dust particles acted on by a high velocity gas flow is discussed. The model uses output from a computation fluid dynamics (CFD) or direct…
As human activities on the Moon expand through initiatives like NASA's Artemis program, the need for sustainable post-mission disposal strategies becomes critical to maintaining the lunar environment. This paper analyzes the logistics and…
When launching or landing a spacecraft on the regolith of a terrestrial surface, special attention needs to be paid to the rocket exhaust cratering effects. If the effects are not controlled, the rocket cratering could damage the spacecraft…
With humans returning to the Moon under the Artemis program, understanding and mitigating effects from Plume Surface Interactions (PSI) will be essential for the protection of personnel and equipment on the Moon. To help characterize the…
Sputtering by solar wind ions is a key process driving the ejection of high-energy particles into the exospheres of airless bodies like asteroids, Mercury and the Moon. In view of upcoming missions which will deliver new in-situ data on…
The Apollo 12 lunar module (LM) landing near the Surveyor III spacecraft at the end of 1969 has remained the primary experimental verification of the predicted physics of plume ejecta effects from a rocket engine interacting with the…
Aims. Particles ejected from the lunar surface via hypervelocity impacts form a torus between the Earth and the Moon. According to our previous study (Yang et al., A\&A, 659, A120), among them about $2.3\times10^{-4}\,\mathrm{kg/s}$…
Returning humans to the Moon presents an unprecedented opportunity to determine the origin of volatiles stored in the permanently shaded regions (PSRs), which trace the history of lunar volcanic activity, solar wind surface chemistry, and…
Space weathering is an important surface process occurring on the Moon and other airless bodies, especially those that have no magnetic field. The optical effects of the Moon's space weathering have been largely investigated in the…
Lunar regolith, the layer of unconsolidated material covering the Moon's surface, is central to the science and technology developed for the Moon, notably related to in-situ science investigations, resource utilization, surface…
Herein the transient lunar phenomena (TLP) report database is subjected to a discriminating statistical filter robust against sites of spurious reports, and produces a restricted sample that may be largely reliable. This subset is highly…
Given the renewed scientific interest in lunar exploration missions, complete understanding of lunar near surface environment and its exosphere under different conditions is of paramount importance. Lunar exosphere has been extensively…
Modeling has been developed to support the development of volatile extraction technologies for the Moon, Mars, asteroids, or other bodies. This type of modeling capability is important to avoid the high cost of multiple test campaigns in…
In this work we present laboratory measurements on the reduction of the threshold friction velocity necessary for lifting dust if the dust bed is illuminated. Insolation of a porous soil establishes a temperature gradient. At low ambient…
The transfer of material between planetary bodies due to impact events is important for understanding planetary evolution, meteoroid impact fluxes, the formation of near-Earth objects (NEOs), and even the provenance of volatile and organic…
The physical state of the lunar soil in the permanently shadowed craters of the moon is inferred from experimental investigation. The permanently shadowed craters do not undergo the same thermal cycling experienced by other parts of the…