Archives for: January 2009
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Keeping Your Moon Base Dust Free (Without Hiring Martha Stewart)
by Darnell Clayton 
Despite its beautiful, "crispy" appearance, lunar dust can be a nuisance to both man and machine, clogging gears and irritating lungs.
Now it looks as if scientists have developed an innovative way of removing these pesky particles without the need of hiring a professional lunar duster.
(New Scientist) To solve the problem, Clark's team is working on SPARCLE, a "lunar dust buster" that astronauts could utilise in the airlock to a moon base. The device consists of a positively charged metallic nozzle fitted to an electron gun, similar to those used in electron microscopes, which fires a focused beam of electrons from a hot filament.
Following a moonwalk, astronauts would scan the beam across the surface of their dirty equipment, showering it with electrons until all the dust particles and the surface become negatively charged and start to repel one another. This would loosen the particles' grip, allowing them to fly to the positively charged nozzle where they are captured.
While this technology will obviously benefit astronauts fortunate enough to explore Earth's nearest neighbor, it will also help reduce "lunar chores" around a future space base (as our astronauts would probably rather work at the lab than dust it off).
(Hat Tip: Space Transport News)
01/28/09 12:09:18 am, 
Calling alll Bloggers!
by Tom (admin)
Link: http://www.moonsociety.org/volunteer-descriptions.html#bloggers
At the January 21st Management Council meeting, it was decided to do something with our blog. This blog was created to handle daily news from our simulation crew at the Mars Desert Research Station, Feb 26-Mar 11, 2006.
After the simulation was over, I tried to keep it going and for a time I was posting 2-5 times a month. Even that pace is insufficient to keep blog watchers interested.
In between there has, I believe, been one post by Charles Radley and another by James Rogers.
We are now actively looking for more bloggers.
The Planetary Society has an excellent blogger, Emilly Lakdawalla. Not sure if she is a paid volunteer or a staff person, but she keeps it going.
http://planetary.org/blog/
Now NSS has just announced its new blog
http://blog.nss.org
Not sure who is behind that as I just heard about it today in the new NSS Downlink e-letter
Take a look at all the long list of categories listed on the NSS blog page
These suggest a divide and conquer approach. I would be happy to come up with an appropriate list of appropriate categories.
For example, we might get Ken Murphy to post on new books
Someone else on NASA
Someone else on Private Enterprise
You get the idea.
I think this approach has real possibilities.
We could even solicit posts from our chapter leaders, as they will have an "on the ground" approach that may be refreshing.
Our various Project Team leaders (we have ten teams) could post progress updates
I suggest that we work a feed from the NSS blog now that we are mutually affiliated.
Who sees the blog? That was the question to date.
But we are talking about moving the feed for the daily news stories to another page, just keeping the link on the home page, and using that large vacated space for the current blog post.
So how about it?
Email me if you are interested.
kokhmmm at aol.com
Tell me about your blogging experience and about your favorite Moon-related and space-related topics.
Peter Kokh
President, The Moon Society
Moon Society input to the Obama Transition Team on Space
by kokhmmm
At its January 14th meeting, the Moon Society Management Council, mindful that different members have different ideas about how the nation's space program could be better run and better targeted, has not as yet officially endorsed either of two position papers put together separately by Director of Project Development David A. Dunlop and by Chair of the Publicity and Outreach Committee, James A. Rogers.
Dunlop's paper is extremely comprehensive and commands enormous respect. We urge our members to look at Dave's idea of how US Space programs and initiatives could be reorganized to better lead to the open civilian frontier and Earth-Moon Economy to which the Society pledges its efforts. Dave's recommendations are nothing short of revolutionary, no quarter yielded to those who would just tweak the current program.
http://www.moonsociety.org/whitepapers/3rd-generation-space.html
As of this post, we have only seen the first draft of James Rogers’ paper so we cannot comment on it as yet. Much shorter, it may serve as the Guest Editorial in MMM #222, the February issue of Moon Miners’ Manifesto, next in queue.