Microwaves are useful for more than just heating up leftovers. They can also make landing strips on other worlds, at least according to research published by a consortium of scientists from the University of Central Florida, Arizona State University and Cislune, a private company. Their research shows how a combination of grading lunar soil and then blasting it with microwaves can create a landing pad for future rockets to the Moon and prevent surrounding buildings from being blasted by 10,000km/h dust particles .
This system works in large part because certain minerals on the lunar surface are magnetic, and those same minerals are also very susceptible to being heated by microwaves. In particular, a type of glassy mineral called ilmenite, which makes up about 1-2% of the Moon’s surface, is highly magnetic.
Ilmenite is formed when the Moon is blasted by small meteors and forms a material called agglutinates. For older lunar soils (that is, those that have not been recently blasted by a meteor), up to 60% of the soil consists of these aggregates, while only 20% of “younger” lunar soils do they are Therefore, concentrations are high enough in some places that contain significant amounts of older regolith.
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Understanding regolith will be key to setting up any kind of lunar base, according to this UT interview.
So if future explorers wanted to make a landing pad, they could remove this older soil with strong microwaves to sinter it and create a surface durable enough to allow a rocket to land on it without sand all around. This sandblast would be particularly bad since there is no air to slow down the dust particles, as there would be on Earth.
The solution seems simple enough: blast the soil with microwaves to sinter it. However, systems can always be improved, and this microwave sintering process is no exception. The researchers found that by subjecting the regolith to a process known as beneficiation, they could increase the amount of microwaves it absorbed and thus the effectiveness of the heating process.
The benefit, in this case, is to sift through the soil and hit it with a magnetic field, causing the more magnetic soil to move toward the magnet, while the non-magnetic soil would simply fall back to the ground. Dr. Phil Metzger, one of the lead authors of the study, compares the process to what recyclers do here on Earth: they sort the material by its magnetic strength, allowing magnetic material, such as ordinary steel, to be separated from the most valuable stainless steel. steel, which is not magnetic.
In this UT video we describe why using in-situ resources is useful for all sorts of things.
On the Moon, when the magnet turns off, the magnetic ground would rest on top of the non-magnetic type. And since magnetic soil is also much more susceptible to microwaves, the beneficiation process could increase the amount of energy the material absorbs by 60-80%.
This is an absurd improvement and one that could drastically reduce the required size of the microwave power supply needed for this mission. Given the weight of some microwave power supplies, any reduction in their weight could dramatically reduce the cost of the overall program.
The paper also looks at other potential runway creation methodologies, including polymer-based pads for paving. However, the cost-effectiveness of using in-situ resources, such as those in the microwave sintering project, is the most effective at the current price of putting the equipment into orbit.
While that price could drop significantly in the coming decades, this technique looks like one of the best for Artemis mission planners who hope to land a reusable rocket on the Moon sometime this decade. For now, next research steps would include testing the microwave power source and conducting similar tests on the ground in a simulated lunar environment, including vacuum. If some microwaved meals are anything to go by, smelling the resulting stuff might not be the best idea.
More information:UCF – Methods for building lunar landing pads may involve a microwave moon soilUT – What is the best way to build landing strips on the moon? to build landing strips and other structures on the Moon from Regolith
Main image: An artist’s rendering of a lunar base. Credit – NASA
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