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This is a very simple starting point for an article on Lunar Soil. Hopefully, over time, enough information will be accumulated here, and make this article useful as a resource regarding lunar soil and its properties. This stub was created in 5 minutes, but a good accumulation of facts and knowledge will only result from editing over an extended period of time.
Feel free to make any and all corrections - including complete revision of anything written - if it will result in a higher level of accuracy and usefulness.
Despite the simple title, Lunar Soil is a topic which covers fairly wide range of information. Future subsections should include:
1. Origin of Lunar Soil
2. Composition of Lunar Soil
3. Mining and Processing of Lunar Soil
4. Engineering Challenge Posed By Lunar Soil - a place for the current knowledge of Engr
challenges of lunar soil (this will not be a speculative section; instead it will focus
on existing knowledge from legitimate sources)
4.1. Civil Engineering: lunar soil properties differ from those of Earth soil,
and all future structures built on the Moon depend on concrete knowledge
of its soil
4.2. Mechanical Engineering: Moon's surface is covered by a layer of extremely fine,
electrically charged dust - the lunar regolith; Any mechanisms operating on the
Moon will have to be safe from the effects of that dust settling on moving parts
This is just a tentative index of topics which should be covered by the fully developed article.
What I started as a very bad draft in 2006 has been edited so nicely, it is actually pleasant to read. It still misses important information, but what a change. I'm humbled by al the editing that everybody contributed to my very bad draft. It's so cool to see :) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 209.6.175.42 (talk) 03:41, 23 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
The comment(s) below were originally left at Talk:Lunar soil/Comments, and are posted here for posterity. Following several discussions in past years, these subpages are now deprecated. The comments may be irrelevant or outdated; if so, please feel free to remove this section.
It appears that this article is written in US English, based on the use of the term "oxidize" instead of "oxidise". I based this on looking at the latest version, not by looking back to find the first non-stub version that established a national variety, which is what WP:ENGVAR and WP:RETAIN actually specify. Consequently, I changed "centimetre" to "centimeter" and will shortly add {{American English}} to the talk page. YBG (talk) 17:50, 22 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]
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The change away from the term 'soil' seems a good one, and obvious once someone has pointed it out. But Dirt doesn't fit either. What is a good alternative? Randy Kryn (talk) 19:29, 25 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
Lunar dirt → Lunar soil – this was hastily moved from "Lunar soil" to "Lunar dirt." By convention, lunar regolith is called "lunar soil" in the English language (19,900 results in Google Scholar) and not "lunar dirt" (98 results in Google Scholar). Technical arguments in favor of calling it lunar dirt because it lacks biological activity are factually true, but irrelevant, because that's how the terminology is used outside of Wikipedia. WP:COMMONNAME etc. Geogene (talk) 18:39, 30 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose, user Geogene went on a stalkish reverting spree. Wikipedia is not a democracy and it does not care about language conventions. This is an encyclopedia and follows science, or at least it should. Just because someone makes an error and others blindly copy it does not mean error should be allowed to continue to progress. That is how literature and textbook myths are formed. Soil is a living system recognized in biology, pedology, ecology and geology. Dirt, or if you will, "finer regolith", is the mineral component. Use the word regolith if you like, but don't use soil. We haven't discovered any soil outside Earth. When we do, feel free to include it in a relevant article. Lajoswinkler (talk) 22:28, 30 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Support. There seems no question that lunar soil is the common name, and in any case the bold move should be reverted as no valid rationale was provided. Lunar regolith is a more general term and we probably want an article on it too. Build that article and then we can discuss a merge is my suggestion. Meantime move to comply with the naming policy. Andrewa (talk) 02:32, 8 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
18:53, 25 January 2021 Lajoswinkler talk contribs block m 22,934 bytes 0 Lajoswinkler moved page Lunar soil to Lunar dirt: "soil" is defined as a mixture of biogenic organic material, organisms and dirt and is therefore present only on Earth. The Moon has no soil. This has been established long ago. https://www.britannica.com/science/regolith
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
Abot will list this discussion on the requested moves current discussions subpage within an hour of this tag being placed. The discussion may be closed 7 days after being opened, if consensus has been reached (see the closing instructions). Please base arguments on article title policy, and keep discussion succinct and civil.
Lunar soil → Lunar regolith – "Lunar regolith" is a much more accurate common term to refer to this specific Lunar surface material, and is generally a more favoured search term than "lunar soil" per google trends. The current title also unintentionally obscures this from pages like regolith, which discuss the concept more broadly that's being applied here. As others pointed out in the last move that was made, it's the more accurate term to use for this topic. I'm also requesting the same move for Martian soil. Warrenᚋᚐᚊᚔ 08:02, 27 June 2024 (UTC) — Relisting.BilledMammal (talk) 16:10, 4 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I did! Thanks, not my intent to WP:CANVAS at all, rather these articles fall under that wikiproject's purview but I should have been more careful with expanding the argument, and I'll edit what I said there in to both of these. Warrenᚋᚐᚊᚔ08:29, 27 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I could be a little biased here as a regolith specialist, but I've basically never encountered consistent use of "soil" here outside of either much older papers or some more general public conversations, where regolith is still more common (and this seems to be backed up by google trends), and both articles accidentally distinguish the Lunar and Martian surfaces from the main regolith article. I would have just done it but there was a recent rename discussion on Lunar soil after someone renamed it Lunar dirt, so I didn't want to just plow ahead.
Support, probably time to rename this per encyclopedic accuracy. "Soil" is made by living organisms, so using the term for lunar material is metaphorical and not scientific. Of course the redirect should remain. Randy Kryn (talk) 13:49, 27 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Undecided, in terms of WP:COMMONNAME, I (suprisingly) found there are more scholarly ghits for "lunar soil" (24,500) than "lunar regolith" (23,000). I think both should be mentioned in the lead sentence. My guess would be there are more WP searches for the former, since regolith is an unfamilar technical term. Praemonitus (talk) 13:59, 27 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I believe you're using Google Scholar, which indexes just about anything it can, so you get a lot of inexpert content thrown in there and shouldn't be used as a proxy for scholarly discussions. Soil is used in the literature, but the specific term for what the Lunar surface is made of is regolith, and we have a regolith article here. Soil is typically a distinct thing, in a planetary surface context it's the sub-centimetre component of regolith, so this falls against being technically inaccurate as well.
Looking through a number of pages of scholarly ghits for "lunar soil", I'm seeing a large number of scientific papers using "lunar soil" in their title. Hence, I don't think that option can be arbitrarily tossed aside based on an Earthly definition of soil. Praemonitus (talk) 15:17, 27 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose per WP:COMMONNAME. The purpose of the title is to make the content easily accessible to non-technical readers, and when this has been proposed in the past, consensus was in favor of keeping it here on those grounds. Also, not everyone is pedantic about this [1], [2], [3], [4], [5] Of course, consensus can change, and maybe one of these days we can move Extinction eventtoMass extinction, where that page belongs.... Geogene (talk) 15:38, 27 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I’m not actually sure it’s the common name at this point, even in popular press regolith seems to be more common than soil but my bubble could be very much obscuring this one, and it does create ambiguity when we have regolith and separately articles pointing to the two primary regoliths that avoid that term.
it’s worth pointing out that if you dig into papers the ratio of “soil” to “regolith” shrinks, so it does seem to be changing. Warrenᚋᚐᚊᚔ22:32, 27 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Besides, it's not soil. Soil is the common name for an organic-infused (and created) by-product on Earth. The Moon, not so much (although 'Lunar soil' should still be an alternate name in the lead sentence). Randy Kryn (talk) 22:50, 27 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It honestly is used, there’s even a specific technical definition for soil in a Lunar context, but it feels oddly disjointed considering “regolith” isn’t that obscure a term. Warrenᚋᚐᚊᚔ23:50, 27 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks, then my mistake in believing that 'soil' meant soil, and wasn't really aware that the term had officially, in some form, been extended to the moons and planets. I'll follow this discussion and may have to rethink my support, but maybe not. Randy Kryn (talk) 00:58, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Well, it refers specifically to one size fraction of the lunar soil, so “regolith” is still more technically accurate for the general surface. So it comes down to how people feel about technical accuracy vs what people are perceiving as the WP:COMMONNAME. Personally I don’t think the average person thinks about the lunar soil enough at all to make a strong case that the moderately even split in usage of terminology warrants the loss of accuracy on WP:COMMONNAME grounds, since to me it isn’t cut and dry that there is is a meaningfully common name. Warrenᚋᚐᚊᚔ07:33, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
