Speaker
Description
It is well known from the apollo era that lunar dust is a great challenge for lunar surface operations and must be addressed to achieve sustained human presence on the moon. Lunar Dust can cause many potential problems for surface missions and space equipment so minimising dust contamination, understanding the potential effects, and having effective dust mitigation techniques are essential for humanity to successfully return to the moon. The Space Resources Challenge invites teams to design and operate a rover to excavate lunar regolith and sort it by particle size for further processing. The challenge culminates with selected teams field testing their rovers at the LUNA facility. Part of the evaluation criteria is reducing the dust contamination to the lunar environment from the rover activities, which is evaluated using a range of passive sensors to monitor the levels of dust throughout the challenge. The method for monitoring the dust contamination was tested at LUNA to assess its feasibility for being able to compare the levels of dust contamination generated by each team.
