Grace Tyrrell in BBC:
Barbie can do it all. In Greta Gerwig’s 2023 film, she appears as a US president, a Nobel Prize winning physicist, a Supreme Court Justice and even a mermaid. The movie reflects the many roles the doll has had over the decades. One of her most famous is as a space explorer. In the 1960s, Astronaut Barbie was transporting children on space adventures even before Nasa’s own astronauts had taken their first steps on the Moon and 13 years before Nasa began accepting female astronauts into their programme.
Now Barbie has been helping space exploration for real. In recent experiments, scientists used the dolls to test methods of removing Moon dust from spacesuits. Wearing a tailor-made spacesuit, Barbie was coated in volcanic ash by a team from Washington State University and sprayed with liquid nitrogen. They found this technique is more effective than previous cleaning methods.
Why is lunar dust a problem? Moon dust is “ubiquitous, abrasive and electrically charged”, according to Ian Wells, a graduate researcher at Washington State University, who was speaking to the BBC World Service programme Unexpected Elements. These “annoyingly clingy” microscopic particles statically stick to the spacesuits of astronauts and are difficult to clean off. During the Apollo missions, astronauts were unable to remove the dust using standard brushes, resulting in damage to the seals on their spacesuits.
More here.