When in 1969 American astronauts first walked on the dusty lunar surface, they returned to the command module of his ship with the symptoms of hay fever. And many “good words” to the very small, blackish-grey substance, which filled all the holes on the outside of spacesuits, thoroughly sasori mechanisms. Today we know that the pioneers of the still very lightly.
Lunar dust is fundamentally different from the earth, as formed in the absence of atmosphere, wind and moisture. Millions of years of micrometeorites crushed lunar regolith without resistance, his irradiated with cosmic radiation, deformed the strongest temperature changes. The result is a substance with very small dimensions of the granules, strong adhesion, chemically reactive, and in addition with high static charge.
Scientists from the University of stony brook simulated lunar soil and made a series of experiments in which test subjects were killed all the living samples. It turned out that lunar dust creates the effect of silicosis — a serious lung disease that affects miners or people in the region with dust storms. That’s just moon dust was much more aggressive and the accumulation of killed 90 % of the cells in the lung tissue of a person faster than observers reacted to the appeared changes.
Even worse had mice whose neurons after contact with the lunar dust got irreversible DNA damage. They waited for a natural death from cancer. Scientists do not yet understand the mechanism of this process, but it is obvious that the probability of tumour formation when working with the dust is extremely high. Future colonists would be protected as they were not in serious danger.
Source — Stony Brook University