Even with crater walls looming behind the whitewashed single-storey buildings, it would be easy to miss the sleepy town of Tao. It only takes a few moments to pass through it as you drive down the LZ-20 motorway that cuts through the center of Lanzarote, in the Canary Islands. Although it Near the crater of Tamiya volcano In the heart of the island, Tao is not one of the main tourist attractions on Lanzarote.
Recently, however, the city has been welcoming visitors of a very different kind—those whose interest lies not in the volcano, but in the dark gray soil on which Tao is built. This dull, rocky material is playing an amazing role in one of the most ambitious human endeavors of this decade. It will help return humans to the moon.
A team of Spanish scientists found that basalt in a quarry near Tau bore a striking resemblance to samples of lunar regolith—the blanket of earthy and rocky debris that covers the surface of the moon—returned to Earth by the Apollo 14 crew in 1971. They used it to create a simulated lunar regolith sample that could Use them to test devices and experiments before sending them to the moon.
The soil sample, called LZS-1, is the latest in a list of lunar regolith simulations of varying quality developed to help NASA and other space agencies around the world prepare for missions to the moon.
Among the first lunar simulators developed were Minnesota Lunar Simulant 1 (MLS-1) at the University of Minnesota in 1988 from basalts found at An abandoned quarry in Duluth, Minnesota. The researchers discovered that the rocks are similar Soil chemical composition was collected from the corner of the Sea of Tranquility It was visited by the Apollo 11 astronauts. The dark Mare regions, or “seas,” of the Moon consist largely of basalts rich in magnesium and iron while the lighter Highlands regions consist of rock composed mostly of calcium and aluminum.
The six Apollo missions that landed on the moon between 1969 and 1972 replayed 380 kg (837 lb) of lunar soil and rocks with them down to earth. These specimens have been enthusiastically protected due to their limited availability.
“They were precious and only used for important scientific research,” says John Gruner, an astronomer in the Astronomical Materials Research Division and Explorational Sciences at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. However, engineers, biologists, botanists, and other research teams working on moon-related projects need something to test their equipment and experiments on. It requires materials that replicate the physical, chemical, and mineralogical properties of lunar regolith, not only to see how devices such as spacecraft and spacesuits can adapt to the lunar environment, but to ultimately test whether it is possible. Growing food in the lunar soilor use it for Manufacture of building materials To build lunar bases in the future.
