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by dreen 1146 days ago
What other solutions were discussed? Are there any crazy ones?

My favourite idea is to somehow apply massive amounts of heat to the lunar surface basically melting the given area. Since there is no wind you won't get new dust there.

3 comments

Not wind as we deal with on earth, but that same process that electrically charges the dust also moves it enough that there's a large cloud of sodium atoms in it it's shadow[0]. That and other elements do travel a bit around the surface. Unsure what kind of fluxes we'd have to deal with, but keeping an area dust free would involve some constant effort.

[0]https://carlschmidt.science/Moon/Moon.html

Chairface Chippendale was just ahead of his time!
Probably simpler to spray some kind of adhesive.
You’re mass-constrained on the Moon. A big parabolic mirror could (slowly) fuse an unlimited amount of regolith.
New dust is constantly showing up, so it’s still a finite area.

https://sservi.nasa.gov/articles/leaping-lunar-dust/