NASA simulates tiny part of the Moon on Earth
NASA has recreated the Moon's surface on Earth.
A lab with ultra-realistic lighting conditions and terrain features has been designed to recreate the two major types of lunar surfaces that future robots, rovers, and astronauts will experience in the Moon's polar regions.
The so-called Lunar Lab and Regolith Testbed located at NASA's Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley houses two large indoor "sandboxes" filled with tons of simulated lunar dust.
With both testbeds, most areas on the Moon can be simulated with a high degree of accuracy. The facility's first sandbox measures approximately 13 feet by 13 feet by 1.5 feet (4 metres by 4 metres by 0.5 metres) and is filled with eight tons of Johnson Space Center One simulant (JSC-1A) - making it the world's largest collection of the material.
The JSC-1A simulant mimics the Moon's mare basins and is dark grey in colour. The facility was recently upgraded to include a second, larger testbed, filled with more than 20 tons of Lunar Highlands Simulant-1 (LHS-1), which is light grey to simulate the lunar highlands.
It measures 62 feet by 13 feet by 1 foot (19 metres by 4 metres by 0.3 metres) and can be reconfigured to be a smaller, but deeper, testbed. Sometimes researchers painstakingly shape the dust with hand tools to recreate, as accurately as possible, features astronauts and rovers are likely to encounter. These include tiny pits and small craters measuring as small as a couple of feet to a few yards across.
