In article , Jonathan Silverlight says...

In message , John Schilling
writes

[Lunar dust]

And one of the things they found out, was that it was really, really,
really, really horribly dusty. The stuff got *everywhere*, anything
you touched, anything you walked on, anything that touched anything
you touched or walked on, ad infinitum. Plus, it was abrasive. If
you're thinking "abrasive" means "like sandpaper", no. It means,
"like military-grade nanobots designed to tear apart machinery from
the inside out". Three days on the Moon, and spacesuits were in
need of a major overhaul.

So the hypothesis that no air = no dust problems, is false. Indeed,
the opposite appears to be the case. It would be nice to get a sample
of Martian dust to be sure, but the stuff appears to be much less of a
nuisance than the Lunar variety.

It doesn't appear to have seriously harmed the rovers as yet, but is
there any other evidence for that? AFAIK, it's still thought that the
dust may be chemically highly reactive, and it's carried by wind, which
can't be good news.

Chemical reactivity we can deal with; we know how to make Teflon. And
wind-borne dust *can* be good news. A dust grain that's being carried
by the wind is a dust grain that is constantly bouncing into other dust
grains. On Earth, at least, that tends to erode things into round-ish
lumps, even if they started as razor-edged nightmare cutting machines.

That the Mars rovers are still workin, is very nearly proof that Mars
dust is an order of magnitude or more less troublesome to machinery
than Lunar dust.


--
*John Schilling * "Anything worth doing, *
*Member:AIAA,NRA,ACLU,SAS,LP * is worth doing for money" *
*Chief Scientist & General Partner * -13th Rule of Acquisition *
*White Elephant Research, LLC * "There is no substitute *
* for success" *
*661-951-9107 or 661-275-6795 * -58th Rule of Acquisition *