Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771
ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM
Monday, November 26, 2007 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium
William Farrell
"The Lunar Dusty-Plasma Environment: Avoiding the Hazards"
ABSTRACT -- Lunar dust has been identified as a hazard to future lunar human operations. Its inhalation is a health risk, its interaction with human systems leads to critical life support degradation, and its contact with mechanical and flight systems leads to premature equipment malfunction. However, the small particles are not in isolation, but rather are part of a larger electrical dusty-plasma environmental system that will be described in this talk. As will be shown, there are two components of dust transport: a natural component driven by the surface E-fields, which can be hyper-energetic at the terminators/polar regions, and an anthropogenic component that interacts with humans, vehicles, and equipment. Each component has its own hazards. Potential mitigation processes being discussed by the lunar community will be described. The main objective of the presentation is to point out that while the dust poses an intrinsic hazard, the solar-wind driven electrical environment in which the dust, objects, and lunar surface all reside strongly influences the degree of the risk. Thus, dusty-plasma environmental conditions play a key role in any dust-mitigation/hazard-avoidance strategy.
SPEAKER -- Dr. William Farrell has been a planetary scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center for over 17 years. He did his post-doctorial work while at GSFC in support of the Voyager Neptune encounter in 1989, and subsequently has become a science investigator on the Wind, Saturn/Cassini, and Mars Express missions. His interests in dusty-plasmas include science studies of the 1994 Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet encounter with Jupiter, Mars dust storms and associate terrestrial desert analog studies, the dusty-ice rings of Saturn, and the lunar surface. He is a member of numerous exploration-related Mars and lunar study groups to determine the impact of dust on human activities, and is currently advising exploration development teams on the lunar dusty-plasma environment. He has won five science project group achievement awards and three technology innovation awards, and is an author of over 130 publications on atmospheric and planetary electrodynamics.