The US is not the only country that wants to go back to the Moon. China is also planning future Moon missions to rival NASA’s efforts – and it’s even researching and building a research facility that simulates a low-gravity environment. on the moon.
Chinese researchers are developing a facility that can simulate the gravity of the Moon’s surface, the South China Morning Post reports. The artificial moon will be a vacuum chamber that uses strong magnetic fields to recreate the low-gravity environment.
It is expected to be built in a few months. Once fully operational, it will make gravity “disappear” or “last as long as you like,” said Li Ruilin, a geotechnical engineer at the China University of Mines and Technology.
China is looking to take the lead in a new international space race with the US. China’s lunar exploration program successfully landed a probe in the dark side of the planet in 2019 and 2020, especially bringing rock samples back to Earth for the first time in 44 years. Next, China wants to send astronauts to the Moon by 2030 and establish a joint Moon research facility with Russia. Chinese authorities say construction of the research station could begin in 2027, many years earlier than planned.
Currently, simulating low gravity on Earth requires flying in an airplane to a certain height and then conducting a free fall for several minutes.
The developers of this project explain that the new Moon simulator, which is a machine containing a vacuum chamber, contains a small “Moon” measuring only 60 cm in diameter – it can simulate simulate low-gravity or zero-gravity for as long as you like, and are large enough for researchers to test a number of instruments and instruments to see how they respond to the Moon’s low-gravity environment.
Inside the simulated “room”, they created an artificial Moon landscape, made up of rock and dust as light as those found on the surface of the Moon.
NASA also plans to return astronauts to the Moon by 2024 under its Artemis program. The base in Xuzhou will play a key role in China’s future space exploration missions, including building infrastructure on the Moon. Here, scientists will test equipment and reduce costly miscalculations due to environmental differences. Rocks and dust on the Moon can behave completely differently than on Earth. It also has no atmosphere, sudden temperature changes, and low gravity.
The Moon’s gravity is one-sixth as strong as Earth’s, and inside the artificial gravity chamber, the team used strong magnetic fields to simulate the “flying effect” of low gravity.
The concept of using a magnetic field to levitate came from Russian physicist Andre Geim, who won the 2000 Ig Nobel Prize for building a frog float.
Geim works at the University of Manchester and won the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics for the work he did in creating graphene.
China has set a goal of sending astronauts to the Moon by 2030 and establishing a base on the Moon, in a joint project with Russia later this decade.
It is expected that this artificial moon will play an important role in future missions to the Moon, allowing scientists to plan and prepare for construction in low-gravity conditions.
According to the team in Xuzhou, experiments carried out on a simulator show that the resistance of the drill on the Moon can be much higher than predicted by theoretical models. In addition, the Moon simulator can also be used to test whether new technology such as 3D printing can be applied on the surface of the Moon and help assess the feasibility of a plan to build a new moon. permanent human settlement on this planet.
The flying frog is Andre Geim’s experiment. It is lifted by magnetic force. The magnetic force is exerted by an electromagnet (a coil of wire in which an electric current flows). Normally, a frog is not magnetic, but when placed in the magnetic field of an electromagnet it also becomes a weak magnet – this is a phenomenon in physics known as “induced diamagnetism”. Magnetic force pushes the frog up. Since the magnetic force is equal to the gravity of the frog, it is in equilibrium and can float in the air.
According to Andre Geim, the antimagnetic lift is inherently very weak, so every day we don’t care. The story of magnetic force balancing with gravity must be seen to believe. He not only experimented with frogs, but also performed with other objects. At first, only colleagues and students came to see it for fun, then more and more people from all over the world came to see it.
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