Back to Search Start Over

Improvement of the electron beam (e-beam) lunar dust mitigation technology with varying the beam incident angle

Improvement of the electron beam (e-beam) lunar dust mitigation technology with varying the beam incident angle

Authors :
Mihaly Horanyi
Ulf E. Israelsson
John Goree
Inseob Hahn
B. Farr
Xu Wang
Source :
Acta Astronautica. 188:362-366
Publication Year :
2021
Publisher :
Elsevier BV, 2021.

Abstract

Dust hazards are considered to be one of the technical challenges for future lunar exploration. In our past work a new dust mitigation technology was introduced utilizing an electron beam to remove dust particles from various surfaces. This technology was developed based on a patched charge model, which shows that the emission and re-absorption of electron beam induced secondary electrons inside microcavities between dust particles can lead to sufficiently large charges on the dust particles, causing their release from the surface due to strong repulsive forces. In this paper an improvement in the effectiveness of this technology is demonstrated with varying the beam incident angle on dust-covered sample surfaces by rotating the samples relative to the beam. Due to random arrangements of the microcavities, more of them will be exposed to the beam with various incident angles, thereby causing more dust release from the surface. The cleaning performance is tested against three samples: glass, spacesuit, and a photovoltaic (PV) panel. Lunar simulant (

Details

ISSN :
00945765
Volume :
188
Database :
OpenAIRE
Journal :
Acta Astronautica
Accession number :
edsair.doi...........acba320e34c139e235ac64d84ac146f1
Full Text :
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actaastro.2021.07.040