Would a person sink into moon dust at all, regardless of how long it’s been there? Our mental picture of dust is what we find under our bed, and that consists almost entirely of long filaments with enough rigidity to form a cushion, with particulate clinging to the filaments, which would be absent on the moon.
I just opened a bag of flour and set a claw hammer down into it, flat-ended handle down, analogous to an astronaut’s foot. It sank under its own weight 3/8 inch, and it took considerable force to shove it down further than that. Flour is about as “dusty” as any earthly solid, and I can’t see where a person walking around on it would sink in enough to even remark about it.
Allowing for the moon’s gravitation, an adjustment in the surface packing of the dust would be cancelled out by the reduced force of the body resting on its surface.
You wouldn’t sink into pretty much any fine, dry powder that isn’t smooth and friction free (and lunar dust is very jagged) unless you happen to be standing on it during an Earth/Moonquake, in which case you are screwed.
I agree but the powers that be don’t … maybe it’s a Z81 problem and we don’t want to be exclusive now do we … but yeah, the extra wear-and-tear on the keyboard for those 15 characters seems useless just to serve the 286 population …
For the last year I have worked in the concrete industry.
Pretty elaborate measures have to be taken to keep cement powder, fly-ash, slag, etc from packing solid in the silos.
The way this is prevented is by injecting air into the powder, which fluffs and lubricates the powder particles allowing it to flow.
My point is that air content plays a big part in how fine powder material behaves, and all of our intuition includes an implicit assumption that there is air present within the powder…yet air is something lacking on the lunar surface, so we should not expect the lunar dust to behave anything like Terran dust.
