NASA's Desert Research and Technology Studies

Imagine driving your car down a dusty road and struggling to see through your windshield. You could employ the windshield washers and wipers and try to clear it off, but a new technology has given you an alternative choice. With a press of a button an electrostatic field is created around the windshield's surface, and the dust simply fly's off in the wind. While this technology may not be commercially available for some time, it is one of many projects being developed for lunar exploration by NASA's Desert Research and Technology Studies.

The RATS

The Desert RATS, as they are called, travel from the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida to the desert outside of Flagstaff, Arizona every year to test out projects in an environment that shares a few important qualities with the surface of the moon - mostly the dust. While in the desert the experts from NASA will test systems covering communication, cryogenics, lunar exploration and more, all the while following a general scientific philosophy of looking for applications that lie outside the stated purpose of a project.

The Desert RATS team is serious about getting their job done, but they are not above having fun while they are about it. During one experiment that left them with a container of super cold nitrogen that had no other use, they made ice cream for the team in the middle of the desert. The project, naturally falling under the cryogenics group, was to see if there was a way to keep propellant from boiling off during lunar landings. The propellant chemicals - which would normally boil away into the lunar atmosphere and be of no use - would now be frozen and collected to be reused by future lunar missions.

Other projects involve the dust of the desert, which shares a number of qualities with the ever present, ever pervasive lunar dust that will haunt all missions to the moon. Two projects shared one purpose - keep the dust out of the valuable, delicate equipment and resources. One took the challenge of transferring liquids from one container to another while keeping the dust out of the hoses during the connection stage (it was successful) while the other started the germ of theory that may one day give drivers earth-side dust-repelling, static-charged windshields. Affixing electrodes to a transparent plastic filter, the Desert RATS team set up the electrostatic field required and watched the dust clear off the filter. The application for NASA could be huge, keeping any viewing port free of dust such as lunar habitat windows, space suit viewing plates and more.

Final Thoughts

The desert provides a great place to test out rovers that will eventually find their way not only to the surface of the moon but Mars as well. The utilization of Earth's varied and, in some cases, extreme terrain has often served NASA and other space programs well. Scientists study life and interaction in the desert, but also in the great depths of the oceans, the extreme heat of volcanoes and the intense cold of the arctic as well.

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