Lunar day/night-period - how to handle its impacts?

Regarding lunar stations the extreme difference of the lunar day/night-cycle to the earthian cycle has to be considered.

During the 14 days long lunar day there is a permanent heat of more than 100° C followed by 14 days cold of less than -100°.

This requires either an environment condition - not an air condition solely - or an extremely good isolation. Perhaps the heat of the 14 days long lunar day could be stored somehow (zinc-oxide-based solar power station as an example) to heat when lunar night is at the lunar station.

Next the change from day conditions to night conditions is very abrupt on the Moon because there is no atmosphere.

Might it be that at the ende the decision will be done to have four stations on the Moon and to move the crew from station to station to have the possibility to shut down stations completely during lunar night????

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I am thinking about this because of the health of the astronauts merely.



Dipl.-Volkswirt (bdvb) Augustin (Political Economist)

The first stations would likely be near or at the "north" pole, so as to get constant (albeit weak) sunlight. That should help reduce the temperature problem. As far as heating and cooling closer to the equator, I don't know that anybody's really done much work on how to solve that, unless they're just assuming we'll haul up a huge refrigerating/heating unit to keep the facility livable.

G'day,

Cover the habitat with dirt to protect the humans from radiation and you have given it a pretty good insulator. Getting rid of the waste heat is likely to be the problem even during the night.

Ralph

I had thought of the dirt (er, regolith), but not about waste heat though. Good thinking.

Use the heat differential to produce power?

I don't know if there would be much heat to get rid of though. I was watching a programme on the telly about the gold and jet miners of Australia. There is a town in the middle of nowhere which is just the hottest dustiest nastiest place ever. The inhabitants have taken to excavating their homes from the red stone, digging tunnels and even opening out spaces for underground swimming pools and the like. All very sci-fi, cum stone age, very odd. Anyway, one of the inhabitants was saying that because they're underground, they actually have to heat their home and pool. They did this with solar collectors on the surface. So I suspect this is going to be the case for any buried lunar base too.

Actually I suspect they were opal mines.

In between I am thinking about two ideas that might provide a solution for the problems perhaps that caused NASA to decide to go to a polar crater.

One possibility would be to go subsurface. It is supposed that the layer of dust is at least one meter thick - this should be no problem. What's below that layer of dust is unknown and will have to be checked. It is supposed that there will be rocks and rocky grounds. These might be a problem - what would you recommend to get rid of it?

If the problems can be solved a habitat could be placed into the hole and then it could be covered. Then there would be avacuum around the habitat that isolates against the variations of the surface-temperatures.

The other idea is to use a very slow moving habitat - it might have tracks. This habitat could roll along very slowly because it is not expected to move faster than ((3450 km * Pi)/2)/14 days = 16.13 km/h which should be no problem on the Moon.

What would be aproblem in this case are larger structure with booms and other conections lots of meters long.



Dipl.-Volkswirt (bdvb) Augustin (Political Economist)

What's wrong with building in a crater, and then filling it with dust and debris, leaving only airlocks, observation, and communication platforms exposed. Maybe a partial crater could allow garage access too.

As for how to deal with rock and stuff under the lunar dust. I'd suggest explosives. Yeah. Imagine the cool looking effects of deep explosions in a reduced gravity environment. Nice. Then you just need to scoop it out.

Hello, Sean Girling,

in principle there's nothing wrong with it.

I am thinking about ways to avoid to expose habitats to high variations of temperature.

But then the contacts of the habitat to dust, debris etc. should be kept as few and low as possible because dust etc. could be heated by contacts to dust etc. of the surface via heat conduction. In so far simply filling the crater looks like a not that good way to me.

The crater might be covered simply.

A thicker layer between the surface and the hole beneath it containing the habitat would have additional advanatges like better shielding against the solar wind.



Dipl.-Volkswirt (bdvb) Augustin (Political Economist)

I have an excellent idea for how to solve this problem. How do I get in touch with someone within Nasa who would be interested? I don't want to post about it here and screw myself out of the credit for what is an original concept no one seems to be anywhere near thinking of.

... I will tell them for you

It's good that Jeff Barrows has a new idea that nobody has thought of yet. I suggest that he patent it, and make sure it's an international patent. In fact, he may need to establish a patent office on the moon to ensure no one infringes on it there.

The temperature several meters below the surface of the moon stays at the day/night average. At the equator this is around 70F. You just need to burrow underneath the surface and build the habitat there. Or the habitat could be built on the surface and then covered with several meters of moon dirt.

Well, he says he's worried about getting the credit, not about commercial exploitation. Jeff, what I think you should do is write a paper about your idea and submit it to a scientific journal. NASA has plenty of scientists who read those journals, and your name will be on it so that nobody can take the credit from you. Also, peer review is a very good way to improve your ideas, so by the time it appears in print, your idea is likely to be even better.

Yep, composing a paper that you'd want others to read and can stand up to peer review is a great way to refine an idea. So is the patent and business case/plan writing process. Often its more useful than the document it creates.