Open Access Published: 01 April 2015 Estimation of Apollo Lunar Dust Transport using Optical Extinction Measurements John E. Lane¹ & Philip T. Metzger^2,3 Acta Geophysica volume 63, pages 568–599 (2015)Cite this article 684 Accesses 16 Citations 23 Altmetric Metrics details Abstract A technique to estimate mass erosion rate of surface soil during landing of the Apollo Lunar Module (LM) and total mass ejected due to the rocket plume interaction is proposed and tested. The erosion rate is proportional to the product of the second moment of the lofted particle size distribution N(D), and third moment of the normalized soil size distribution S(D), divided by the integral of S(D)⋅D2/v(D), where D is particle diameter and v(D) is the vertical component of particle velocity. The second moment of N(D) is estimated by optical extinction analysis of the Apollo cockpit video. Because of the similarity between mass erosion rate of soil as measured by optical extinction and rainfall rate as measured by radar reflectivity, traditional NWS radar/rainfall correlation methodology can be applied to the lunar soil case where various S(D) models are assumed corresponding to specific lunar sites. Download to read the full article text References Atlas, D. (1953), Optical extinction by rainfall, J. Meteor. 10, 6, 486–488, DOI: 10.1175/1520-0469(1953)010>0486:OEBR<2.0.CO;2. Article Google Scholar Berg, M.J., C.M. Sorensen, and A. Chakrabarti (2011), A new explanation of the extinction paradox, J. Quant. Spectrosc. Rad. Trans. 112, 7, 1170–1181, DOI: 10.1016/j.jqsrt.2010.08.024. Article Google Scholar Berger, K.J., A. Anand, P.T. Metzger, and C.M. Hrenya (2013), Role of collisions in erosion of regolith during a lunar landing, Phys. Rev. E 87, 2, 022205, DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevE.87.022205. Article Google Scholar Clegg, R.N., B.L. Jolliff, M.S. Robinson, B.W. 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Dussauge (2006), Turbulent Shear Layers in Supersonic Flow, 2nd ed., Springer Science+Business Media, New York, 424 pp. Google Scholar van de Hulst, H.C. (1957), Light Scattering by Small Particles, John Wiley & Sons, New York. Google Scholar Wexler, R., and D. Atlas (1963), Radar reflectivity and attenuation of rain, J. Appl. Meteor. 2, 2, 276–280, DOI: 10.1175/1520-0450(1963)002>0276: RRAAOR<2.0.CO;2. Article Google Scholar Download references Author information Affiliations Easi-ESC, Granular Mechanics and Regolith Operations, Kennedy Space Center, FL, USA John E. Lane NASA Granular Mechanics and Regolith Operations, Kennedy Space Center, FL, USA Philip T. Metzger Florida Space Institute, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL, USA Philip T. Metzger Authors John E. Lane View author publications You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar Philip T. Metzger View author publications You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar Corresponding author Correspondence to John E. Lane. Rights and permissions Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits use, duplication, adaptation, distribution, and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. Reprints and Permissions About this article Cite this article Lane, J.E., Metzger, P.T. Estimation of Apollo Lunar Dust Transport using Optical Extinction Measurements. Acta Geophys. 63, 568–599 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1515/acgeo-2015-0005 Download citation Received: 24 January 2014 Revised: 16 October 2014 Accepted: 18 November 2014 Published: 01 April 2015 Issue Date: April 2015 DOI : https://doi.org/10.1515/acgeo-2015-0005 Share this article Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content: Get shareable link Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article. Copy to clipboard Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative Key words Mie scattering efficiency factor for extinction particle size distribution mass erosion rate shear stress shape factor

A mathematical model and software implementation developed to predict trajectories of single lunar dust particles acted on by a high velocity gas flow is discussed. The model uses output from a computation fluid dynamics (CFD) or direct simulation Monte Carlo (DSMC) simulation of a rocket nozzle hot gas jet. The gas density, velocity vector field, and temperature predicted by the CFD/DSMC simulations, provide the data necessary to compute the forces and accelerations acting on a single particle of regolith. All calculations of trajectory assume that the duration of particle flight is much shorter than the change in gas properties, i.e., the particle trajectory calculations take into account the spatial variation of the gas jet, but not the temporal variation. This is a reasonable first-order assumption. Final results are compared to photogrammetry derived estimates of dust angles form Apollo landing videos.