They want to raise a large dust cloud from the moon to save the earth. wait what?

The idea of ​​using dust from the surface of the moon to fight global warming on Earth seems absurd at first and even at a second. However, as it turns out, that idea really does exist. Importantly, this does not mean that it is necessary to bring huge amounts of regolith from the Silver Globes to Earth. What is happening?

in another Scientific article The researchers proposed to reduce the amount of sunlight hitting the Earth’s surface by blocking it with fine dust from the surface of the Moon. According to scientists, this dust can be located in the space between the Earth’s atmosphere and the Sun. Before the solar wind and radiation pressure can disperse this dust, it will block our sun for about a week. impact? This dust, at least in theory, would reduce the amount of solar radiation reaching Earth by about 2%. This, in turn, would at least slow climate change.

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How much dust is needed to cool the Earth? Huuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuh

There is one problem with this idea. In order to record the measurable effects of such a project, orbit would have to be delivered… note… 10 million tons of dust. annually. To illustrate the scale of the problem, that’s 100 times more than what humanity has sent into orbit in the entire history of space exploration, which spans more than six decades.

A certain “facilitation” here is the fact that, thanks to six times less gravity, sending anything from the surface of the Moon is much easier than sending it from the surface of the Earth. To send so much dust into space from the Earth’s surface, we would have to make 700 times more flights than humanity has done so far. From the Moon, it will be a little lower, as scientists lean toward the electromagnetic lift of dust into orbit. To date, however, the details of such a system have not been developed.

Lunar dust collected from the surface of the Moon, for example from the North Pole, and shot from it at a speed of 3-5 km / s towards the L1 vibration point, would obscure the Earth to an extent equivalent to covering the Sun for a week in a year.

The L1 point of vibration is a point located on the line connecting the Earth and the Sun, at a distance of about 1.5 million km from the Earth. In this place, the gravitational influence of the Earth and the balance of the Sun, so that objects (space probes or dust) located in this place maintain a fixed position relative to the Earth. Currently, space observatories such as SOHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) and DSCO (Deep Space Climate Observatory) are located there. It should be noted here that if someone delivers millions of tons of lunar dust there, this will most likely mean the end of the work of these telescopes.

The whole idea above, of course, for now is a purely theoretical consideration of what we can do if the situation becomes so dire that we have to take some extra time to deal with climate change. To date, there is no system for launching dust from the Moon toward L1, and despite years of efforts, no human has yet set foot on the surface of the Moon in the 21st century. Perhaps everything will change in the next decade. After all, the Artemis program has begun, and China has announced that in 2030 it intends to put astronauts on the Silver Globe.