Artificial Moon
CHINA BUILDS AN ‘ARTIFICIAL MOON’ FOR GRAVITY EXPERIMENTS
The new experiment was inspired by a levitating frog
Reported by Ben Turner
© Getty
Chinese scientists have built an ‘artificial Moon’ research facility that will enable them to simulate low-gravity environments using magnetism. The facility, launching this year, will use powerful magnetic fields inside a 60-centimetre (23.6-inch) diameter vacuum chamber to make gravity ‘disappear’. The scientists were inspired by an earlier experiment that used magnets to levitate a frog. Ruilin Li, a geotechnical engineer at the China University of Mining and Technology, said that the chamber, which will be filled with rocks and dust to imitate the lunar surface, is the “first of its kind in the world” and that it could maintain such low-gravity conditions for “as long as you want.”