You know that in the coming years the world powers want to arrive and install bases on the moon that will serve as the beginning of the exploration and exploitation of lunar resources and industries, but the bases, mines and scientific facilities are going to need routes that unite them.
How to build a road on the moon? On the moon there is no oil to make asphalt and the water will be so valuable that it cannot be spent making cement, for this reason the European space agency has proposed a solution and that is to create roads by melting the lunar dust with a laser, which also has another added advantage and that is that by melting the dust we reduce its volume around the facilities because the dust is very annoying and dangerous.
Lunar dust is ultra fine, abrasive and sticky, in the Apollo era, the dust jammed equipment and eroded space suits, the Soviets lost the Lunac 2 rover when the dust coated the rover's radiator causing it to overheat.
The idea of melting soil rather sand to make roads is not a new idea, it was first proposed in 1933 in order to create routes in desert areas, this project of the European space agency is called PAVER, acronym in English for paving the way for the synthesis of regolith in large areas, regolith is what the dust, grains and small rocks that make up the lunar soil are called.
The project is directed by several German scientific institutions. In the images that we are going to see, a 12 kw carbon dioxide laser was used to melt a simulation of lunar dust. Authentic lunar dust would be very expensive, which is why a simulated one is used. By melting with the laser, a solid glass surface about 20 cm wide was created, also creating triangular structures that together could form a pavement that can be used for a road or a landing strip.
Researchers have calculated that in 115 days a landing strip of about 100 square meters could be built with a thickness of about 2 cm of dense material, but be careful because the plan would not be to take a laser to the moon, which would also require a lot of energy. energy, the researchers' project proposes something more amazing, they want to take a Fresnel lens a couple of meters in diameter and use it like a giant magnifying glass, using concentrated sunlight to melt the soil of the moon, if Archimedes saw it he would feel very proud.
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