Photo: Sarbajit Banerjee
We’ve landed on the Moon before, so we know it can be done. The problem is we’re going to do so much of it that we expect the Moon to fight back.
Arriving on another celestial body is a dangerous endeavor, not only because these operations tend to happen a lifetime away from any help, but also because of what takes place during landing.
The Moon is a relatively solid piece of rock, with no major surprises lurking under the surface, but it has the nasty habit of greeting its visitors with a lot of dust, as the Apollo astronauts found out the hard way. The first man to set foot on the Moon, Neil Armstrong, cited “a transparent sheet of moving dust” at 100 feet from the surface (30 meters), with decreasing visibility as his ship was getting closer.
There is no wind on the Moon, of course, so it is us humans who kick up all that dust when we get there in our big fancy ships. For now, that wasn’t a problem, but given how more and more of us will go up there, a more permanent solution than what NASA currently has planned might be needed.
One such solution could be the RAM. That would be Regolith Adaptive Modification, a technique meant to reinforce and fuse lunar surface materials.
RAM is designed to use microcapsule delivery systems to shoot into the soil “nanothermite mixtures and organosilanes,” substances that help bind the surface. The technology could be used to create anything from landing pads to the base of foundations for other buildings that might be needed.
There is only one major flaw with this system, though. It does not exist.
RAM is an idea currently being pursued by Sarbajit Banerjee from the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station and backed by NASA through the Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program. There is no guarantee it will actually be made and used, though.
The Moon is a relatively solid piece of rock, with no major surprises lurking under the surface, but it has the nasty habit of greeting its visitors with a lot of dust, as the Apollo astronauts found out the hard way. The first man to set foot on the Moon, Neil Armstrong, cited “a transparent sheet of moving dust” at 100 feet from the surface (30 meters), with decreasing visibility as his ship was getting closer.
There is no wind on the Moon, of course, so it is us humans who kick up all that dust when we get there in our big fancy ships. For now, that wasn’t a problem, but given how more and more of us will go up there, a more permanent solution than what NASA currently has planned might be needed.
One such solution could be the RAM. That would be Regolith Adaptive Modification, a technique meant to reinforce and fuse lunar surface materials.
RAM is designed to use microcapsule delivery systems to shoot into the soil “nanothermite mixtures and organosilanes,” substances that help bind the surface. The technology could be used to create anything from landing pads to the base of foundations for other buildings that might be needed.
There is only one major flaw with this system, though. It does not exist.
RAM is an idea currently being pursued by Sarbajit Banerjee from the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station and backed by NASA through the Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program. There is no guarantee it will actually be made and used, though.
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