Posted on 06/29/2019 11:01:34 AM PDT by BenLurkin
European researchers and students are conducting a mock moon habitat trial under a glacier near the famous Matterhorn in Switzerland's Alps.
Called IGLUNA, the demonstration is organized by the Swiss Space Center and the European Space Agency. Teams from across Europe arrived in the car-free mountain town of Zermatt, Switzerland, last week to set up their experiments, which include an ice-digging robot, a construction robot, an algae bioreactor and a hydroponic system for growing veggies. They've also built a habitat 8.5 feet (2.6 meters) tall buried deep in the ice.
Zurbrügg, who is leading the habitat-construction team, said that his group's original idea was to have one of the other teams use its ice-cutting robot to slice bricks from the glacier and assemble the mock habitat, but the plan turned out to be too complicated to realize for various reasons. For instance, the ice in the glacier isn't pure but mixed with stone and sand, which would cause difficulties for the robotic saw, he said. Instead, Zurbrügg's team manually assembled bricks made from fiberglass and wood.
Some of the other IGLUNA experiments are taking place inside that arched building. For example, Tatiana Volkova, an engineer of habitats in extreme environments and a doctoral student at EPFL, is looking at how people behave in confined conditions. Cameras inside the small building will record everyone who goes inside. Later, using an algorithm to track the movements of researchers and visitors, Volkova will analyze how people tend to move around each other inside the habitat.
"It can help to identify potential errors of design," Volkova told Space.com, adding that once the methodology has been tested, it could be used to study human behavior in more intense habitat simulations, where one set of participants stays in the mock habitat for a long period.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
*ping*
Again where is the hard radiation, the moon quakes, the lack of air, the extreme cold, the lower gravity? Don’t even begin to compare cold temperatures: Antarctica - coldest minus 59, Moon - minus 280.
Mock environments are fine as far as they go, but lack the problems that create the biggest challenges to human Lunar occupation
Thanks fieldmarshaldj.
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