Idea: Electrostatic Lunar Mining | Suggestions and Questions | Forum

I had this idea a while back, and haven't seen it pop up anywhere else (though always willing to be proven wrong).

I recalled that one of the problems in the original moon missions was a build-up of lunar dust that was highly abrasive, being attracted to the astronauts and their equipment because it was photo-ionised.

I've seen the entries for NASA's lunar mining robot contest, and it occurred to me that this property might be exploited, and avoid readily wearing moving parts too!

I imagine a mining craft moving to a certain position and embedding a spike or auger into the bedrock to ground it, then extending either a directional funnel or "trunk" lined with panels to electro-statically attract the lunar dust. Essentially hoovering it up.

I suspect with careful design, electrical fields could at once draw the dust down the collector and repel it from it's surfaces. Possibly some sort of peristaltic motion.

Actually processing the dust is another matter entirely, though I have wondered since there is a hydrogen resonant frequency (as exploited in microwave cookers), there must be resonant frequencies for other elements. And perhaps in a low-gravity and electro-statically confined environment, this could be used to create some sort of microwave fractional distillation column?

Depending on the dust content though, perhaps it could simply be printed and sintered into 3D objects? Or a combination of the two; separating into various powders for more precise sintering, etc.

If the latter is possible, by combining both in one machine it could drastically reduce the amount of equipment requiring transport to the lunar surface to set up automated manufacture there.