Space/Science — HabitableZone

Space/Science » in reply to ok- a question

Dust is a pain
Larry J — (archived)

Dust eventually gets into everything. If the suit is hard shelled, it can work its way into the joints and erode them. If it's soft shelled, it gets into the fabric and can cause problems. Lunar dust is highly abrasive, similar to powdered glass. In addition, your life support system has moving parts, and those parts can be affected by dust.

When you come back inside, you bring the dust back inside the spacecraft where it can clog air filters, be inhaled, and cause other problems (dust can cause some electronic circuits to overheat or even short circuit - quartz is a conductor.) On the Apollo lunar missions, the astronauts reported the smell of gunpowder when they came back in from an EVA. That was the smell of lunar dust. A NASA researcher is looking into the health effects of breathing lunar dust</I., and they don't look good. But Russell Kerschmann never forgot. He's a pathologist at the NASA Ames Research Center studying the effects of mineral dust on human health. NASA is now planning to send people back to the Moon and on to Mars. Both are dusty worlds, extremely dusty. Inhaling that dust, says Kerschmann, could be bad for astronauts. "The real problem is the lungs," he explains. "In some ways, lunar dust resembles the silica dust on Earth that causes silicosis, a serious disease." Silicosis, which used to be called "stone-grinder's disease," first came to widespread public attention during the Great Depression when hundreds of miners drilling the Hawk's Nest Tunnel through Gauley Mountain in West Virginia died within half a decade of breathing fine quartz dust kicked into the air by dry drilling--even though they had been exposed for only a few months. "It was one of the biggest occupational-health disasters in U.S. history," Kerschmann says. This won't necessarily happen to astronauts, he assures, but it's a problem we need to be aware of--and to guard against. Quartz, the main cause of silicosis, is not chemically poisonous: "You could eat it and not get sick," he continues. "But when quartz is freshly ground into dust particles smaller than 10 microns (for comparison, a human hair is 50+ microns wide) and breathed into the lungs, they can embed themselves deeply into the tiny alveolar sacs and ducts where oxygen and carbon dioxide gases are exchanged." There, the lungs cannot clear out the dust by mucous or coughing. Moreover, the immune system's white blood cells commit suicide when they try to engulf the sharp-edged particles to carry them away in the bloodstream. In the acute form of silicosis, the lungs can fill with proteins from the blood, "and it's as if the victim slowly suffocates" from a pneumonia-like condition. Fortunately, the lunar dust was sterile. We'll have to find a better way of keeping the dust outside of the spacecraft when we eventually go to Mars. Until we know for sure, we have to assume that the dust might contain living organisms. It might even be toxic. From the same link: Martian dust could be even worse. It's not only a mechanical irritant but also perhaps a chemical poison. Mars is red because its surface is largely composed of iron oxide (rust) and oxides of other minerals. Some scientists suspect that the dusty soil on Mars may be such a strong oxidizer that it burns any organic compound such as plastics, rubber or human skin as viciously as undiluted lye or laundry bleach. "If you get Martian soil on your skin, it will leave burn marks," believes University of Colorado engineering professor Stein Sture, who studies granular materials like Moon- and Mars-dirt for NASA. Because no soil samples have ever been returned from Mars, "we don't know for sure how strong it is, but it could be pretty vicious." Moreover, according to data from the Pathfinder mission, Martian dust may also contain trace amounts of toxic metals, including arsenic and hexavalent chromium--a carcinogenic toxic waste featured in the docudrama movie Erin Brockovich (Universal Studios, 2000). That was a surprising finding of a 2002 National Research Council report called Safe on Mars: Precursor Measurements Necessary to Support Human Operations on the Martian Surface.

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