Brief
The University of Central Florida researchers are working on a NASA-funded project to find ways to build lunar landing pads that keep people and equipment safe but are also economical and easy to construct in space. The work is led by defense and space manufacturing company Cislune and includes research from Arizona State University.
Insight
Establishing a moon base will be critical for the U.S. in the new space race and building safe and cost-effective landing pads for spacecraft to touch down there will be key.
These pads will have to stop lunar dust and particles from sandblasting everything around them at more than 10,000 miles per hour as a rocket takes off or lands since there is no air to slow the rocket plume down.
However, how to build these landing pads is not so clear, as hauling materials and heavy equipment more than 230,000 miles into space quickly becomes cost prohibitive.
That’s why University of Central Florida researchers are working on a NASA-funded project to find ways to build lunar landing pads that keep people and equipment safe but are also economical and easy to construct in space. The work is led by defense and space manufacturing company Cislune and includes research from Arizona State University.
The team has found that a method that uses microwaves to melt lunar soil, coupled with UCF-developed beneficiation, or sorting, technology, may be the best option.The findings were published recently in the journal New Space and in a report submitted to NASA.
“It’s strategically important for our nation to have a presence on the moon because the economic value of the resources in space is very high,” says Phil Metzger, a co-author of the research. He is a planetary scientist at the Florida Space Institute based at UCF.
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