Deutsche Welle :
When the German Space Agency (DLR) and European Space Agency (ESA) unveiled their version of the moon – the LUNA Analog Facility – in late September 2024, they got two-thirds of the way to representing the moon’s strange landscape. One crucial element was missing.
Pitch darkness was broken by a spotlight trained on two fully-suited astronauts – Germany’s Matthias Maurer and France’s Thomas Pesquet.
Maurer and Pesquet marched across the hangar, with its 700 square meters of artificial regolith, made from the volcanic soils of Italy’s Mount Etna, Germany’s Eifel region and rocks from Norway.
Equipped with long-handled scoops, a sample trolley and robotic dog, the pair pretended to explore the fake lunar surface in front of about 100 dignitaries.
As they walked, the light shone from a precise angle to simulate how the sun will obstruct an astronaut’s vision when humans return to the moon, possibly this decade.
But they walked – they didn’t bounce as in footage from the 1969 Apollo 11 mission – because LUNA has no lunar gravity.
Against a cinematic soundtrack, Maurer and Pesquet demonstrated how they would collect samples and explore a crater on the real moon. It was a spectacle for the politicians and agency officials, who fist-bumped the astronauts for the TV cameras and their crews.
