Moon too static for astronauts ?

Lunar colonists could be in for a nasty shock literally. A team of US scientists has found that the Moon's surface can become charged with up to several thousand volts of static electricity.This charging could release sparks that disable electronic equipment  including monitors, space buggies or even the front door of a Moon base. And it could cause dust clouds that clogs up instruments. What's worse, it can be caused by bad weather in space: just when astronauts need their equipment to give them warning and allow them to shelter from the radiation.But not everyone sees the news as bad. "I'm overjoyed this work was carried out," says Dale Ferguson, a scientist at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama. "Data about the surface charging of the Moon was sorely lacking," he explains.Jasper Halekas of the University of California, Berkeley and his co-workers knew that the Moon's surface could become charged when electrically charged particles in the solar wind plough into it. This process, they realised, could have left an imprint that the Lunar Prospector, which orbited the Moon in 1998-99, might have detected.

So Halekas and colleagues scanned through the data collected by the Lunar Prospector, and found that the surface charge can get as big as 4,500 volts. "That's more than enough to do some damage, if the electric field only extends over small distances," says Halekas. Any metal equipment would be vulnerable, though an astronaut might be protected by the insulation of his or her suit.Halekas cautions that their observations were for charging over large areas, so the strength of local fields on the lunar surface is still unknown if the charge is very spread out, then it might not cause a shock at all.
View: Full Article | Source: Nature.com