NASA brings moon indoors to Kennedy Space Center

Lab, packed with space dirt, simulates lunar landscape

 In a Kennedy Space Center building where Apollo astronauts once practiced stepping off landers and planting flags, robots now dig through NASA’s largest indoor simulation of a lunar-like landscape.

“We have an indoor portion of the moon,” said Philip Metzger, a NASA physicist who leads the Granular Mechanics and Regolith Operations lab at KSC.
The lab’s recently constructed Regolith Test Bin, nicknamed the “Big Bin,” is believed to be the largest indoor, climate-controlled facility of its kind, 26 square feet and packed with 120 tons of gray, simulated space dirt.
It is helping engineers and scientists test mining technologies that could enable future explorers to go beyond flags and boot prints to live on another planetary surface, by harvesting resources like oxygen and water.
The lab is one of four that KSC rebranded last year as Swamp Works, focusing on low-cost, rapid prototype development in the spirit of Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works or Boeing’s Phantom Works.
The group of about 40 employees represents a small but forward-looking corner of KSC that aims to extend the center’s expertise in building and running spaceports to other celestial surfaces. It’s taking KSC a step beyond its traditional role as a launch site.
“We haven’t finished proving the feasibility of these technologies, but we’re getting close,” said Metzger of the research.
The bin’s defining ingredient is dirt NASA stumbled upon — and sank into — during field tests several years ago of rovers and mining machines in Black Point, Ariz.
An engineer attempting to set up a camera got stuck waist deep in a gray mountain of material that turned out to be waste dust from a mining operation.
Asked to look at it, Harrison “Jack” Schmitt, a geologist who was the last man to set foot on the moon, said the crushed basalt behaved very much like lunar regolith.
Soon, a five-gallon bucket of “BP-1,” as it was dubbed, was on its way back to KSC for testing.
“Just fortuitously, it has the same average particle size as lunar soil,” said Metzger. “The particles are all very sharp and angular, just like lunar soil particles.”

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