Moondust for mitigating climate change [View all]

Astronomers are exploring solutions to mitigate climate change, one of humanity's biggest challenges, by using some tiny players — dust particles.

In recent research, they propose mining, scooping and blasting dust from the moon's surface and placing it between Earth and the sun, where the newly placed clouds would shade our planet for a few days before solar wind and radiation pressure dispersed them. In a year, researchers say, such dust shields could reduce Earth-bound sunlight by 1.8%, which falls within the range needed to slow our planet's rising temperature.

Creating such a shade would require 22 billion pounds (10 billion kilograms) of dust per year, which is "roughly 100 times more mass than humans have sent into space to date," the authors wrote in their study.

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