Three undergraduate students from the department of mining and minerals engineering, along with students from other Virginia Tech engineering departments, have recently submitted a final proposal for an engineering design solution as part of NASA’s Big Idea Challenge. If their project is accepted, they will have the opportunity to develop testing procedures and technologies with real applications for the future development of lunar bases and infrastructure.

NASA’s Big Idea Challenge is a collegiate competition which promotes innovative technologies for a broad range of future missions by encouraging the participation of undergraduate and graduate student teams throughout the country. The competition is an open innovation challenge, which means there are minimal constraints on teams so they have the freedom to create truly out-of-the-box solutions.

The mining engineering students participating on this year's multi-disciplinary team are juniors Justin Hartman, Jack Hicks, and George Cray. They are joined members of other VT engineering departments, which include Dakota Yannibelli from mechanical engineering, Min Jae Lee from construction engineering, and Zachary Teter and Pram Patel, both from material science engineering. Dr. Kray Luxbacher, Department Head and C.T. Holland Professor of mining and minerals engineering, serves as the team's faculty advisor, with Dr. Kevin Shinpaugh, collegiate professor of aerospace and ocean engineering, serving as co-advisor.

For 2021, the Big Idea Challenge is focused on dust mitigation and dust tolerating technologies that can be used for future lunar missions. These include the reduction of dust clouds upon craft landing, dust removal from spacesuits and other surfaces, dust obstruction on optical systems, and reducing in-cabin particulate levels.

“As of right now, NASA doesn’t have a great system for dealing with dust,” explained Jack Hicks, mining and minerals engineering junior and co-president for the Virginia Tech Big Idea Challenge team. “NASA realizes that one of the big challenges they will face is lunar dust, which is not only hazardous, but over time can break down sensitive mechanical equipment or disrupt electrical systems.”

Of the four challenge areas that NASA has presented, the Virginia Tech team has chosen to focus on exterior dust prevention, tolerance, and mitigation. Their work aims to address how to protect lunar surface systems from dust as well as how to prevent dust from entering future lunar habitats and landers.

Dust is an ever-present problem on the moon, with the lunar atmosphere’s unique electrical charges contributing to problems of dust adherence. “During a lunar night, the dark side of the moon creates a negative surface charge. As the surface experiences the transition from night to day, it starts to get hit with protons, electrons, and plasma, causing the dust to actually jump off the surface and into the atmosphere,” explained Justin Hartman, mining and minerals engineering junior and team co-captain. “It essentially creates a slow moving dust storm which lingers in the moon’s daytime atmosphere.”

For its approach, the Virginia Tech team is proposing to recreate a known experimental method for charging simulated regolith dust particles and mobilizing them onto surfaces under the exposure of ultraviolet radiation or plasma. “Essentially we’re trying to create the effect of how dust moves off the lunar surface or attaches to objects during the transition from lunar night to day,” said Hartman.

The first phase of the team’s experiment will be to create a testing chamber into which are fed ultraviolet light beam electrons from cathode ray tubes and plasma. The apparatus is designed to simulate the atmospheric charges that take place on the moon and that cause dust particles to "jump” off its surface.

Wang, X., et. al., Experimental Methods of Dust Charging and Mobilization on Surfaces with Exposure to Ultraviolet Radiation or Plasmas. J. Vis. Exp. (134), e57072, doi:10.3791/57072 (2018).

In the next phase, the team plans to use the apparatus to collect both qualitative and quantitative data on the movement, direction, and amount of dust that is moved under controlled conditions. The resulting data will hopefully lead to the development of a technology that can actually control or remove dust.

“Basically, we’re trying to create a dust leaf blower for the moon,” said Hicks, “which is ideally portable and could clean lunar equipment such as solar panels or vehicles.”

The team submitted a video proposal in December, and they are anxiously awaiting the results to be announced at the end of January 2021. If their project proposal is accepted, NASA will fund the team’s project, enabling them to advance their experimental design and turn to more resources in testing their project.

“Our design will need to be vacuum tested as per NASA’s requirements. We’re starting to realize that it’s important to outsource aspects of the design and experiment, since we can’t replicate them ourselves,” said Hicks. “With funding, we can send our device to Los Angeles to be tested at the National Technical Systems (NTS)'s thermal vacuum chambers.”

From NASA's lunar robotics competitions to its Mars Ice Challenge, Virginia Tech mining engineering students have provided critical expertise to these space-oriented engineering events for more than ten years. “Mining has such a huge role in space exploration because the only way we’re going to make space travel economically viable is to actually get profit out of it, either through acquiring information and knowledge, or from resource extraction,” said Hartman.

The students are fully aware of what they bring to the table for this year's Big Idea Challenge. “We mining engineers are becoming more important for solving problems in the field of space engineering and exploration,” agreed Hicks, “especially for a competition like this year’s Big Idea Challenge. Dust mitigation is a mining engineering specialty!”