A Canadian-made moon dust repellent is expected to land on the moon Sunday as part of a NASA-led study.
Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lunar lander launched from Florida on Jan. 15, carrying samples that will be tested for their ability to repel lunar dust.
Two of those samples are treated with a coating developed by Integrity Testing Laboratory Inc., a 13-person company based in Markham, Ont., said Jacob Kleiman, the company’s president and chief executive officer.
“It’s a very big deal,” Kleiman said in an interview Saturday. “We are the only Canadian company that got on this experiment.”
Lunar dust is a big problem for scientists and astronauts on the moon, Kleiman said. Its particles are tiny, abrasive and electromagnetically charged, and they cling to everything, from mechanical equipment to astronauts’ suits.
Companies across the globe are trying to find ways to keep the dust from sticking and building up, especially on highly sensitive optical and thermal control surfaces, he said.
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The samples from his company heading to the moon are made of Kapton—the shiny, gold-coloured material on satellites that looks like foil—and the white paint commonly used on space vessels, he said. Both are covered in his company’s special “diamond-like” coating, Kleiman said.
If the privately owned Blue Ghost lands on the moon as planned on Sunday, it will send valuable data back to Kleiman about how his technology is performing. Back in Markham, his company has a lunar space simulator—“a big chamber in which we create all the lunar conditions,” he said—and his team will expose two similar samples to the conditions expected on the moon and compare the data.
The Blue Ghost spacecraft is expected to land on the moon Sunday at 3:34 a.m. EST, according to Firefly’s website.
