How to make the moon on earth

11 min read

The expense and prestige involved in sending landers and rovers to the Moon means you can’t afford for them not to work when they get there. But the lunar landscape is like nothing here on Earth. So how, and where, do you test equipment that’s bound for the Moon?

by DR EZZY PEARSON by DR EZZY PEARSON Ezzy Pearson is the features editor of BBC Sky at Night Magazine. Her book Robots in Space is out now (£20, The History Press).

Astrobotic’s CubeRover undergoes testing in the regolith pit at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center

NASA/KIM SHIFLETT

ighttime in the Mojave Desert. The stars of the Milky Way turn slowly above a landscape so dark you can barely make it out. Suddenly, spotlights switch on. They’re angled low to the horizon and off to one side, but spill light across a pale grey, undulating terrain that’s pockmarked by craters. You know you’re standing among the sands of California, but lit like this, it looks like you’re on the Moon.

This ‘Moon in the Mojave’ is the work of spaceflight company Astrobotic, which has been building the Lunar Surface Proving Ground (LSPG). The 100m²(approx 1,000ft²) site has been made to look exactly like the lunar south pole. The region was ignored by early Moon explorers, but has witnessed a surge in interest over the last decade after signs of water ice were found in the permanently shadowed recesses of deep craters. Such water could be an invaluable resource both for science and future explorers.

Astrobotic aims to head to the region with its Peregrine and Griffin landers, due to launch this December and then November 2024 respectively. They’re just two of a great many missions supporting NASA’s Artemis programme to return humans, including the first woman and person of colour, to the lunar surface by the end of the decade. But before either Peregrine or Griffin can even think of leaving the ground, they have to be fully tested.

MIMICKING THE MOON

“We do everything we can to simulate the lunar and space environment on Earth before we send our spacecraft off, because you can’t practise in space,” says Alivia Chapla, director of marketing at Astrobotic. “Once you send the spacecraft out, it’s out there. For robotic missions, you can’t fix or touch it once it leaves this planet.” As such, tests are vital for working out any potential problems while they can still be fixed. But when your vehicle is bound for a landscape unlike any on Earth, performing these tests isn’t easy.

The Soviet Lunokhod robotic

This article is from...

BBC Science Focus Magazine

9 November 2023

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