One could make a joke about how an astronaut walking on the lunar surface is rather akin to a cat walking on the carpet in the living room, but out in space the resulting triboelectric discharge can do a lot more damage than just some stinging fingers and a bemused looking cat.<\/p>\n
The problem that NASA and other space agencies are dealing with is that the charge that builds up on a lunar-walking astronaut is very hard to equalize with something like a lunar lander. For this reason they have now set up<\/a> the Lunar Grounding Challenge<\/a> to consult the public whilst dangling $150,000 of rewards in front of anyone ready to pounce with a good idea.<\/p>\n Here on Earth we got many ways in which we can get rid of such an unwanted charge, with dry winter weather demonstrating quite effectively why humidity is a crucial factor here. With no real atmosphere on the Moon, each astronaut thus becomes a walking capacitor, which is worsened when said astronaut ventures outside of the sunlit areas and then returns to the slightly positively charged lander.<\/p>\n The challenge here is thus to equalize the astronaut and lander, with a design specification of a -100 kV or higher astronaut and about 100 V lander. A resulting current should not exceed 1 mA, ideally less than 0.2 mA to remain below human perception levels. If an arc exists it should not contact the suit or astronaut.<\/p>\n Of course, the most low-tech solution would be to use a resistor to limit the current, but at those voltage ranges it would take an awful long time to bleed off, in an environment that\u2019s basically a perfect insulator as space will never be cold. It definitely seems like a fun challenge to sink one\u2019s fangs into.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"One could make a joke about how an astronaut walking on the lunar surface is rather akin to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":636700,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[111,139,69,147,392],"class_list":["post-636699","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/636699","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=636699"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/636699\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/636700"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=636699"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=636699"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=636699"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}