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Dust Mitigation Best Practices Guide Task - Develop an accessible, understandable, comprehensive, and refereed guide to avoiding lunar dust problems during surface operations, both for inexperienced mechanisms designers in academia or small companies and for seasoned mission veterans.
On the surface of the Moon, lunar dust presents unique challenges to long-term operations due to the ubiquitous presence of dust particles in the lunar environment, the dust's potential to electrostatically charge, and its possible chemical reactivity. Whether to avoid exposure, to attempt removal, or simply to tolerate lunar dust infiltrating a system becomes a complex question involving length of required service life, dust effects and critical risks, and mass and complexity trades for the entire system. The Dust Mitigation Best Practices Guide publication provides a snapshot of advice from topical experts for specific areas of concern to systems targeted for deployment on the lunar surface.
Dusty Environments Classifications Task - Develop NASA Lunar Dust Classification Standards and Requirements for Testing Systems and Hardware Exposed to Lunar Dust. Apply Lunar Dust Classification Standards in an Integrated Test Campaign for Lunar Dust Mitigation.
The purpose of this NASA Technical Standard is to establish minimum requirements and provide effective guidance regarding methodologies and best practices for testing systems and hardware to be exposed to dust in dust laden and generating environments. The intent is to facilitate consistency and efficiency in testing space systems, subsystems, or components with operations and missions in dusty environments.
This NASA Technical Standard is applicable to any system, subsystem, or component that will be exposed to planetary dust (refer to definition in section 3.2 in this NASA Technical Standard). There are four different environments in which hardware may be exposed to dust: planetary external (PE), planetary pressurized (PP) volumes, in-space pressurized (SP) volumes, and in-space external (SE).
NOTE: Due to FY22 budget contraints, the Dusty Environments Classifications Task was terminted in April 2022. Additional information is available in the GCD Dusty Environments Classifications closeout report.
Dust Mitigation Best Practices Guide Task - The Dust Mitigation Best Practices Guide will be reference material for future technical development of equipment, materials, and components that will be used in a lunar dust, or similar environment. Future NASA, commercial, and academic research and development for Lunar surface operations and future Lunar missions will refer to this document to understand and avoid Lunar dust issues.
Dusty Environments Classifications Task - Test leads for various programs and projects (as well as test leads for various vendors) will understand how to test in a dusty environment. NASA will have the ability to verify dust-related requirements.
This NASA Technical Standard allows for broad usage for missions to the Moon, Mars, and small bodies (e.g., asteroids) when working with dust or regolith. The requirements and guidance in this NASA Technical Standard are intended to be applied whenever dust testing is performed within a program or project, regardless of level of development (i.e., from design to acceptance to qualification). Additionally, new programs may use different equipment and operations (e.g., in situ resource utilization [ISRU] excavation) that produce new sources of dust or different working dust environments. When appropriate, mission-dependent accommodations and analyses may be needed. Programs should tailor these values for the specific equipment and operations planned.
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