What do Lego, lizards, and 900 tonnes of lunar regolith have in common? The answer: Luna, “a moon analogue facility” and flagship project from the European Space Agency (ESA) and German Space Agency (DLR).
The moon may be almost 400,000km away, but an accurate replica of its surface has opened in Germany to enable astronauts from around the world to use it to train for future missions.
Luna opened its doors last year at ESA’s Astronaut Centre (EAC) in Cologne, Germany. It is the culmination of 10 years of research from a team known as Spaceship EAC who were tasked to recreate the surface of the moon. Irish materials scientist and ESA research officer Dr Aidan Cowley has played a key role in the project’s success.
The surface of the moon is covered with a layer of rock and mineral fragments known as lunar regolith. Rather than take building materials to the Moon, the ESA wanted to explore how to make use of the regolith in situ.
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Cowley, who is from Swords, Co Dublin, and a graduate of Dublin City University, is a science adviser for Luna. “When I first started, [the] ESA was keen to diversify activities at centres and do more work in the area of research and development,” he explains. “And at the time, there wasn’t much happening in an area of research known as in-situ space resource utilisation.”
Cowley liaises with teams of people within Spaceship EAC. He began his career as a research fellow in 2014 and during that time, he worked tirelessly in the lab on classifying and composing a replica version of lunar regolith.
Cowley initially researched how to process regolith and what could be made with it. This led him and his research team to several initial projects, such as producing regolith-based bricks. At the same time, the ESA was anticipating the future and the idea of creating a large-scale lunar analogue facility began to take shape.
The Luna facility is a 1,000sq m research and training facility focused on lunar exploration. It supports various projects related to the moon, including astronaut training, mission simulations, and scientific research. Creating a realistic lunar surface while preparing astronauts for the moon was a critical part of the project’s success. This required Cowley and his team to source material that does not naturally exist on Earth.
The moon’s surface is not exposed to the wind and water that shapes the Earth. With the absence of an atmosphere around the moon, regolith is formed from a constant rain of micrometeorites (the size of grains of sand) that bombard the lunar surface.
As a consequence, in contrast to terrestrial materials, lunar regolith particles are of jagged shape and much sharper. Sharper means more abrasive; a property that affects all aspects of engineering design for lunar missions. Sourcing a material that could simulate these jagged, abrasive qualities of regolith was critical.
“It took us about two years to finalise the composition of the regolith simulant, which we named EAC-1,” Cowley says. “Myself and Victoria S Engelschiøn, a geologist and ESA graduate trainee were the principal architects of the simulated regolith composition. Lunar regolith is extremely well classified and published from rock samples brought back to Earth from the Apollo programme. We compared this lunar composition with materials you can find here on Earth.
“The next big challenge was sourcing large volumes of our required material. If we want to create a lunar analogue facility, we knew that we needed to source 900 tonnes of it. And getting that was a challenge. After an extensive search, we got lucky and found a quarry in a volcanic region here in Germany called the Eifel with specific geochemistry that matched our regolith compositional design.
“Initially, I was the deputy to Samantha Cristoforetti – the Italian ESA astronaut – who was principal project manager for Luna and we led the project up until about 2020 Then once construction began, we handed the project over to the contractors.”
Cowley adds: “During any building project, you hit certain roadblocks which are difficult to predict. A notable challenge for us was an unexpected biodiversity issue. To our surprise, the chosen site for Luna was home to a thriving lizard population, requiring the relocation of hundreds of lizards to protect the region’s biodiversity. That’s not something you plan for.
It took the team more than five weeks to load the regolith simulant into the new lunar facility. Ultimately, the only way we could figure out how to move 900 tonnes was the old-fashioned way; and that was loading it in one shovel at a time. We could only load simulant on dry days because regolith doesn’t dry fully once it gets wet.”
The simulant had to be stored in a silo off-site. On dry days, a call would be made to deliver EAC-1 in 20-tonne batches.
“So on those dry days, 20 tonnes were delivered in the morning, and 20 tonnes in the afternoon. Each batch usually took about three hours to displace it around the facility,” he says.
Due to its fine and abrasive particle properties, EAC-1 simulant is a hazardous material and has to be treated as such. ESA and DLR personnel were the only staff with the required safety clearances. “There was just a few of us who could do it,” says Cowley, “in full personal protective equipment [also known as PPE] too. It was a serious workout.”
Luna opening last September was cathartic, says Cowley. “[It was] in the sense that you finally get to see Luna in its full glory. And [you] get to show people who’ve been hearing about it after all these years, all the problems we encountered and all the stories like the lizard issues.
“We invited people who were involved in making Luna possible, as well as some of the end users that we think will use Luna in the future. ESA astronauts Thomas Pesquet and Matthias Maurer conducted a live demonstration training activity using our specially designed Luna spacesuits. It was a good day for everyone.
“We’ve been fairly inundated with requests to utilise Luna which is great because there’s always a fear that you do this big project and then nobody shows up to use it. Because we invested a lot of our time and our belief into it.”
So what next for him? “My focus now is to support Luna as science adviser”, he says. “I’m on the project team, as the custodian for activities inside the facility. One of my roles is to help evaluate proposals that come in. But I’m also continuing my other work within [the] ESA, of course.”
Innovation is a key part of that. Last year he completed a limited study of 3-D printed Lego-style regolith bricks. Lego was so impressed, that they showcased the brick in 12 of their big stores worldwide. More recently, the research group have been forming bricks by compressing polymer and regolith composite mixtures.
A big part of Luna’s success is the formation of an accurately formed replica of lunar regolith. The project is testament to the 10 years invested by Cowley and colleagues in novel in-situ resource utilisation solutions in preparation for future lunar missions.
But notwithstanding that success, what is the future for European-led lunar missions?
“I think that European access to the lunar surface is coming,” says Cowley. “And it will be [a] whole new era of opportunities for all sorts of different teams, groups and ideas. We will bring their experiments, bring their concepts, bring everything forward for the future, and then who knows what happens after that?”
Lunar regolith is helping to ensure a bright future for Europe in space exploration.
