Rocket exhaust will blow Moon dust into lunar orbit at high velocity. Now researchers are calculating how damaging this will be.
The Moonrush has begun. Last year, NASA’s Artemis 1 mission flew to the Moon and back in a test of the technology that will take humans back to the surface in the next few years. The Artemis program will establish a space station called the Lunar Gateway in orbit and a base on the surface.
The challenge in assessing the risk is that the interaction between rocket exhaust and the lunar surface is poorly understood. The evidence from Apollo missions is that landers’ rocket exhausts appeared to sweep away surface dust leaving a clean rock surface but no crater. However, the damage from such impacts is likely to be minimal. The Lunar Gateway will fly in an elliptical orbit reaching distances of 70,000 km from the surface. Metzger and Mantovani say that the particles reaching this altitude are likely to be tiny — about 10 micrometers in diameter — and will in any case have decelerated due to lunar gravity. “The impact velocity will be only in the range of a few hundred meters per second since the Gateway’s orbit is slow,” they say.
“A spacecraft in Low Lunar Orbit may suffer extensive damage if the timing of its orbit puts it in the path of the ejecta cone from a large lunar lander,” they conclude. That suggests some careful planning will be needed to avoid such incidents.NASA, of course, is aware of the problem and has already begun seeking ways to mitigate the dust problem, perhaps using shields.
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