Photo courtesy of Yonhap News
As China accelerates its exploration of the moon, Chinese scientists have built an ‘artificial moon’, a research facility with a lunar-like environment, Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post reported.
Built in Xuzhou, Jiangsu Province, by researchers from the China University of Mining and Technology, this facility recreates a lunar environment with one sixth of Earth’s gravity, no atmosphere, and extreme temperature fluctuations.
The ‘artificial moon’ is made of light rock and dust just like the moon, and its magnetic field maintains one-sixth the gravity of the Earth.
Li Ruilin, a scientist who oversaw the artificial moon project, said the artificial moon will play a key role in China’s future lunar missions, including the construction of a lunar base.
“In a facility that reproduces the extreme environment of the moon, where rocks and dust move in a completely different way from Earth, we can use technologies such as 3D printing to test whether buildings can be built on the surface of the moon,” said Li Ruirin. said.
“Some experiments on the artificial moon will provide key clues, such as where to find water beneath the lunar surface,” he said.
In the midst of space exploration competition between the United States and China, China is speeding up its lunar exploration, including being the first in the world to land on both the front and back sides of the moon.
China’s unmanned lunar probe ‘Chang’e 3’ landed on the far side of the moon in 2013, followed by Chang’e 4 on the far side of the moon invisible from Earth in January 2019.
Chang’e 5 went to the moon in December 2020 and returned to Earth with 2 kg of lunar soil and rock samples.
In an interview with China Central Television on the 27th of last month, Deputy Director of China’s National Port and Heaven Bureau Wu Yanhua said that the lunar research base would be built around 2027, eight years earlier than planned.
Chinese authorities also approved a fourth-phase lunar exploration project on the 4th, which includes exploration of the lunar Antarctica and the construction of an international lunar research base within the next 10 years.
In the midst of this, the research results announced that a Chinese unmanned probe has found the first ‘field evidence’ to prove the existence of water in the soil and rocks on the lunar surface.
The Institute of Geology and Geophysics under the Chinese Academy of Sciences analyzed lunar soil and rock samples sent by the Chang’e 5 lander Yutu 2 in a paper published in the scientific journal ‘Science Advances on the 7th. said to have detected it.
The world scientific community discovered the existence of water on the moon, which was thought to be arid in 2007, through long-distance observations, but this is the first time that a field study has proven the existence of water.
.
