The Damage to Lunar Orbiting Spacecraft Caused by the Ejecta of Lunar Landers

[paulsutton]

The Damage to Lunar Orbiting Spacecraft Caused by the Ejecta of Lunar Landers

I am posting this here as it seems more of an engineering issue,   so I found a paper posted to the Fediverse, looking at the problem of ejecta from the moon when spacecraft blast off from the surface and the potential damage this could do to any orbiting spacecraft.

The paper can be found on arXiv

https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.12234

Would i be right in thinking that this sort of thing is harder to physically simulate on Earth, even if we had a room where the floor is covered in a layer of moon dust (the fact the moon dust is not very pleasant or safe anyway) as we can't easily simulate the moons gravity on Earth.

The only way to collect data would be to go to the moon, blast off and collect data that way,  then look at that back on Earth. 

How could we perhaps address the issues raised?

 

Paul