Rutgers Lunar Symposium

This week at Rutgers the CSXE(Center for Structures in Extreme Environments) is hosting the Rutgers Symposium on Lunar Settlements. Now this may sound funny to you guys; however in reality it’s all very interesting and I have been enjoying the talks. I am not going to bore you with all the cool things that I have found out from these lectures, just the highlights. Of course a good start one of the lecturers on the first day is the founder of SICSA (Saskawa International Center for Space Architecture) he is also the head of the MS program in space architecture at some university. We of course found this very amusing because you can probably do less with space architecture then with philosophy, along with all the other brilliant bits he put in was to say “your all engineering types so you know that the volume of a sphere increases by r squared” another good one was his reference to something’s radiation life. Now away from the guy who clearly doesn’t belong to a guy who does. This guy discovered that lunar soil is magnetic and then went on to discover that this is because regolith contains Nanophase Iron. Additionally, he developed a lunar magnetic vacuum cleaner that’s uses a series of magnetic coils to suck up lunar dust. Of course the thing to top all of this was his experiment with sintering regolith. He discovered that if you microwave lunar soil it melts (hits a temperature of approximately 1200 C before your water will boil) this is because the Nanophase Iron absorbs instead of reflects the microwaves. Finally the highlight of the first day, I met former Senator Dr. Harrison Hagan "Jack" Schmitt. I shook his hand and got a picture with him. This is by far cooler than meeting an active Member of Parliament like Yoni did. This is because that same hand that I shook took this picture.
Additionally, that hand piloted the Apollo 17 Lunar Module to the surface of the moon and finally he became the 12th man to walk on the surface of the moon.

This is him walking on the moon.

From left to right, Me!!!, Sergey, Dr. Schmitt!!!, Paul, Curran, and Stephen.