How to fake the moon

NASA's Artemis missions have generated a new interest in lunar simulant for testing our future spacecraft and equiptment on the harsh surface of the moon. I visited the University of Central Florida's Exolith Lab to find out how we're making LHS.

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0:00 That's no moon
0:36 We need better simulants
3:11 Make the moon
6:41 Bake the moon
10:26 Results

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Hi, I'm James. I explore the world looking for engineering stories which explore complex issues in interesting ways. I studied Mechanical Engineering from the University of Western Australia and am currently undertaking a PhD in space robotics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

[AtomicFrontier]

Three months later and I'm still finding moon dust in my trousers!

[fireaza]

"The bean counters told me we literally couldn't buy 7 dollars of moon rocks, much less 70 million. Bought 'em anyway, ground 'em up, mixed 'em into a gel. And guess what? Ground up moon rocks are pure poison! I am deathly Ill." -Cave Johnson

[SupremeRuleroftheWorld]

4:45 its amazing how that meteor missed that building and parking lot by just inches.

[hrand]

I’m very impressed with the increasing budget of this show. The trip to the moon just for that intro (and some cheese I presume) could not have been cheap!

[thames_music]

Vsauce, SmarterEveryDay, Veritasium, Tom Scott, Alpha Phoenix, Steve Mould, and now Atomic Frontier. His content is already up there with the greats after being on the platform only a fraction of the time.

[niallsb]

Choosing to shoot the simulant creation process in a white shirt was either the most deliberate decision or James' biggest oversight to date. Fantastic video.

[denver]

7:20 mate thats not baking thats a particle accelerator from the hit game Satisfactory

[PoleTooke]

Shocked that YouTube fed me a video posted 49 minutes ago by a Youtuber Im not even subscribed to, but it wasn't wrong - I love it. Great video, keep it up!

[NNZaero]

Oh My God! You used the Satisfactory particle accelerator in baking part! I'm So Happy!

[samuellove]

I know clickbait is good for metrics, but i was legit concerned 'moon landing was faked content' made it onto my feed.

Im glad to have encountered this channel.

[CristinaAlmarazLopez]

"Rocks the size of small rocks" top tier 0:47

[ThePCguy]

I accidentally misread this as "How to fake the moon landings, " and expected a very different video. But honestly, I'm not disappointed. This is much more interesting.

[ok.]

0:12 "I am not on the Moon, I am in fact - on Mars"

[Fsi]

Were there no health concerns or anything that warranted wearing a mask? Sharp, fine particles don't seem great for your lungs, from what I remember, so I'm genuinly curious

[Lithrus_]

Great video as always James. Really appreciate the subtitles as well, so many bigger channels don't even use them. FYI, your description has some typos: you wrote "Artimus" instead of "Artemis" and "interrest" instead of "interest"

[maximianocoelho]

It reminds me of my experiments on the Geotechnics Laboratory for my course in engineering...Its nice to see advanced application of methods to advance our knowledge of space, I wish space geology becomes a thing in the future, totally worth going back to college to update my references.

[randomviewer]

I think Tom Scott introduced us to your channel, and man am I grateful for that. Your videos are great!

[robo]

This video takes on a funny character when you read/hear stimulant instead of simulant when you are half asleep. I look up and was like what? Then read sub title as we need stimulants then had meltdown for a second. Was confused for a minute there😂😂😂

[benmcreynolds]

What seems the biggest challenge is the amount of static charges causing the sharp dust to stick to & destroy the lunar space suits. It would take very unique circumstances to mimic the conditions of that static sticky sandpaper like issues..

[troysvisualarts]

The title made me first think, oh god is this one of those how the moon landing was fake conspiracy videos, but on watching glad it's not and it's incredibly informative on how moon dust can be simulated on Earth, learned a lot from this video thanks for sharing!