Moon Dirt

Today I followed a Slashdot link and I got confused. The link lead me to a "feature" on a NASA website, an interesting-sounding news-esque story about researchers hunting for a good simulation for lunar regolith, the nasty, grindy, sharp-edged, sticky, spaceship-damaging stuff that passes for dirt on the surface of the Moon. But don't take my word for it:

Micrometeorites, many smaller than a pencil point, constantly rain onto the surface at up to 100,000 km/hr (about 62,000 mph), chipping off materials or forming microscopic impact craters. Some melt the soil and vaporize and re-condense as glassy coats on other specks of dust. Impacts weld debris into "agglutinates." Complicated interactions with the solar wind convert iron in the soil into myriads of "nano-phase" metallic iron grains just a few nanometers wide.

These processes form the "regolith"—Greek for stone blanket (litho + rhegos)—covering the Moon's surface. What greets astronauts and spaceships is a complex material comprising
"sharp, abrasive, interlocking fragile glass shards and fragments," Taylor says. It grinds machinery and seals, and damages human lungs.

So the news, according to NASA, is that researchers led by David S. McKay, chief scientist for astrobiology at Johnson Space Center (and whom you may remember from his work claiming that the Martian meteorite ALH84001 harbored fossilized Martian life) need tons of simulated lunar regolith to test rovers and suchlike.

The problem, it seems, is that NASA used to have simulated moon dirt called JSC-1. But they ran out. So now "researchers at Marshall are working with the Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science office at Johnson to create a replica of the JSC-1 simulant: JSC-1A."

That's right: NASA needs a replica of a simulation of dirt from the Moon.

And oh, PS: the basis of NASA's plan to go back to the Moon and then on to Mars is that they'll be able to establish a permanent lunar base, a beachhead powered by ice in the lunar regolith. (Mine the ice, crack the water into hydrogen for power and oxygen for rocket fuel...or just drink it.) Something that, I feel I should mention, no one has any idea how to actually do. Plus, recent research at the Arecibo radio telescope suggests that, in fact, there ain't no such ice. Which means we actually don't know much about regolith after all. Which makes it sound kind of hard to synthesize, I'm thinking. But that's just bloviating on my part.

And oh, PPS: Why did NASA post this "feature" yesterday when the actual work of developing guidelines and asking for help in making JSC-1A seems to have taken place almost two years ago. See? Confusing.