RTL Today – Luna: Walking on the moon in Cologne: simulating lunar life in Europe

A large, ordinary-looking warehouse in the German city of Cologne is the closest place you can walk on the moon, without leaving Earth.

The facility known as LUNA, which officially opened on Wednesday, is the world’s most entertaining facility for the lunar surface, according to the European Space Agency (ESA).

European astronauts will train inside the unique simulator and test equipment that will one day travel to the Moon, including NASA’s upcoming Artemis program, which plans to send humans there on a mission within a few years.

From the outside, it looks like a huge white hangar in the corner of the German Aerospace Center on the outskirts of Cologne.

But inside the nine-metre-high facility, beneath the blackened ceiling and walls, is a replica of the soil covering the moon’s surface.

Potholes and blocks undulate in and out of the darkness under the stark light of the lone lamp at one end of the 700-square-metre area, the equivalent of more than three tennis courts.

The area is strewn with boulders and choked with a strange pale gray dust.

ESA astronaut Matthias Maurer described walking through the environment wearing a spacesuit.

“When you enter the black zone and the sunlight is in front of you, it can be difficult to find your way,” Maurer told reporters during a recent tour of the facility.

“Is this just a shallow hole or is it an abyss?”

-Hard dust-

Maurer, a materials scientist, has served as LUNA’s astronaut advisor for the past decade.

“It’s a unique facility because it integrates so many different elements that no one else around the world has, not even NASA,” he said.

For Luna, ESA developed and produced 900 tons of its own lunar regolith, the thick layer of dust that covers the moon’s surface.

To the touch, the simulated moon dust called EAC-1A is as rough as a pumice stone, but it is also very smooth.

This combination makes breathing dangerous and can cause equipment problems.

When stepped on, the dust rises and “keeps floating,” Maurer said.

Real lunar soil causes more problems because it is charged with static electricity, which causes it to stick to nearby surfaces.

Because of this problem, astronauts on NASA’s Apollo missions more than 50 years ago feared for the safety of their spacesuits after a few moonwalks.

On the Moon, this powdery dust is the result of repeated exposure by asteroids.

The simulated regolith is “basalt volcanic material that is ground and screened according to our needs and then mixed,” said Jurgen Schlotz, director of the European Space Agency’s LUNA project.

Engineers are still awaiting delivery of 20 tons of regolith from Greenland, which will be used in the “dust laboratory,” a hermetically sealed space inside LUNA for testing equipment.

The facility will also soon be home to a roving artificial sun, which will cast shifting shadows over the terrain.

A complex harness system controlled from the top of the facility will allow astronauts to experience the Moon’s bouncy gravity, which is about 17 percent of Earth’s gravity.

It will also be possible to freeze the LUNA floor to a depth of three metres.

Maurer explained that this will allow astronauts to practice drilling into the frozen lunar earth in search of water ice.

– “Living and working on the moon” –

In one corner, a tilted panel will test how astronauts handle slopes of up to 50 degrees.

This can be difficult, because the first steps on lunar soil can sometimes sink ankle-deep, making it more like climbing a sand dune.

“And after a hard day of walking on the moon for eight hours, you go to FLEXHab,” Maurer said.

The Future Lunar Exploration Habitat (FLEXHab), designed to house four astronauts, will be connected to LUNA within a week.

Astronauts will use a waterproof airlock to prevent lunar soil from entering their home.

The facility will also be linked to an enclosed greenhouse called LUNA, which has been shown to be able to grow vegetables over a five-year period in Antarctica.

This ecosystem should allow us to “understand how to live and work on the moon,” Schlotz said.

It is also hoped that it will help secure places for European astronauts in NASA’s Artemis programme, which plans to return humans to the moon’s surface later this decade.

“Standing on the moon in Cologne” means “one foot is already on the moon,” said Maurer, a potential candidate for a spot on Artemis.