PhD student working to keep astronauts safer on the Moon
Amrita Singh working with a vacuum chamber.
Amrita Singh is studying lunar dust to answer important health and technology questions for future Moon missions.
The gray, crushed rock material that coats the surface of the Moon is officially called regolith and presents substantial dangers, said Singh, a PhD student in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder.
“The Apollo astronauts struggled a lot with lunar dust. It’s electrostatically charged, so it sticks to everything, and it’s basically crushed up glass in terms of how abrasive it is. It poses dangers to crew health,” she said.
Those risks include rapid deterioration of space suits used on Moon walks, as well as damage to systems inside space capsules or habitats on the Moon.
“We need to make sure our life support technologies are capable of surviving the lunar dust environment. It will enter the habitat. There’s no way of completely preventing that,” Singh said.
The recipient of a 2023 National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP), Singh is developing computational simulations and experimental tests of life support technologies to determine their continued effectiveness after exposure.
“My research focuses on worst-case scenarios. What if something goes wrong and the planned dust mitigation strategies fail and there’s dust everywhere?” Singh said. “We know we will see significant performance degradation for many technologies, but we don’t know what the degree of degradation or material damage will be. Those are the questions I’m trying to answer.”
Singh did not originally plan on a career in aerospace. As an undergraduate at the University of Southern California, she double majored in theater and astronautical engineering.
She was drawn to both, but envisioned her future would be in acting or directing. COVID-19 changed her trajectory.
Harrison Schmitt's space suit covered in lunar dust during Apollo 17.
“The pandemic hit my junior year, and all the jobs and plans I had lined up were destroyed,” she said. “I was spending a lot of time at home and took my first human spaceflight class, remotely, with Garrett Reisman, who is a former astronaut. That’s when I started thinking I could love aerospace as much as I love theater. As it turns out, I love it more.”
An aerospace education does present unique academic challenges, but Singh has persevered.
“I really value math and science, but they are not my strong suits and it will take me a couple tries to learn a physics concept before it finally clicks,” she said.
During her senior year, she began a work-from-home internship at NASA’s Ames Research Center, providing exposure to the world of research and piquing her interest in earning an advanced degree.
“The researcher I worked with was doing radiation modeling for cells, and she spent time re-introducing me to chemistry, biology, and physics — these fields I’d fallen out of love with — and made me fall in love with them again. It drove me to pursue a PhD,” Singh said.
She applied to CU Boulder’s bioastronautics PhD program and is now in her second year. In 2023, she earned both the NSF GRFP and recognition as an Aviation Week 20 Twenties Winner, a program that honors promising aerospace students across the United States.
Last semester, she and Ella Schauss, a fellow aerospace PhD student, competed in NASA’s a student competition to design concepts for addressing Moon dust kicked up during descent and landing.
They took third place nationally, earning a $3,000 prize.
“There’s still so many questions about lunar dust,” Singh said. “That uncertainty is what drew me in. It’s such an important aspect of what it means to be in on the lunar surface. It’s really important for the future.”