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Thursday April 23, 2009
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 Static cling makes lunar dust stick to the instruments astronauts use to conduct experiments on the moon, according to a new survey of 40-year-old Apollo mission data. Brian O'Brien, a now-independent researcher in Floreat, Western Australia, and a former professor of space science at Rice University in Houston, determined that the angle of the sun in the lunar sky modulates the "clinginess" of lunar dust, Scientific American reports.
Since the moon has little atmosphere, solar radiation hits the lunar surface and gives it a clingy electrostatic charge, the report said. If O'Brien's theory proves correct, this will be a larger problem for future manned missions than it was back in the Apollo days, when astronauts undertook them in the "morning" (roughly equivalent to a month here on earth, according to the article). The solution? You guessed it: a shed. "A sun-proof shed may provide dust-free working environments on the moon," O'Brien said.
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April 23, 2009 10:22 PM
My wife swears by cling free dryer sheets...