"Artemis II has shaken the space world"

What better place to conduct an interview about the recent Artemis II mission than SnT’s LunaLab? You have to head down to the basement of the campus to discover this room, which replicates a 80 square metre of lunar soil, bathed in the harsh, pale light that illuminates the Moon. On the floor, gravel that kicks up dust with every step, a crater and rocks stand as obstacles in the path of the simulator’s main user: a rover standing 40 cm centimetres tall. This laboratory, the only one of its kind in Europe, was set up to test rover prototypes and improve their movement and behaviour on the Moon. Behind the glass, several control screens and our guide for the day: Sabrina Alam, who has been head of technology transfer at SnT for several months. 

Lëtzebuerger Journal: What is this lunar simulator used for?

Sabrina Alam: Actually in terms of moon missions, what we are trying to do is either collect dust, or we try and either detect what kind of minerals are there, and so on. But a lot of the time this has to be done with lunar rovers. At SnT, a lot of PhD students are focused on lunar exploration, and developing robots for that, so you can see one inside there that goes and actually drives around what we have created in the lab to replicate the lunar surface, to be able to understand various missions.