Artemis: Nasa recreates Moon's surface in giant pool

Life on the Moon is nothing like on Earth...so why not recreate the experience... underwater.

That's what space agency Nasa have been doing to give their latest team of astronauts a better taste of life on the lunar surface.

It's turned a giant swimming pool, known as the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory (NBL), into a Moon replica to help train those who will be heading to the real thing in the next few years.

Those taking part in the training will be joining future missions for the Artemis program, with a historic Moon landing hoped to take place in the next 10 years.

Astronauts Jeremy Hansen, Victor Glover, Reid Wiseman, and Christina Koch will be part of the Artemis 2 crew, who will fly around the Moon and back on the next mission.

V2X is a US-based company helping to achieve the transformation from normal tank to lunar surface.

The team have been busy adding boulders and sand that mimics the loose rock and mineral and fragments found on the Moon (known as regolith), to try and create as authentic an experience as possible.

The astronauts will also be trained to work in floaty, dark conditions expected at the Artemis landing sites.

The team are in process of recreating the conditions found at the Moon's south pole, where astronauts will land as part of the Artemis 3 mission.

In the NBL pool, with the help of weights and flotation devices, the future astronauts will also be able to go 40 feet under the water to experience what's it's like with just 1/6 of the gravity they would have on Earth.

The special tank which holds 6.2 million gallons of water creates an environment which allows astronauts to "hover" underwater.

This recreates conditions similar to the weightlessness they would feel in space, something that is very important when it comes to giving them a taste of what a spacewalk would potentially be like.

The Artemis 2 astronaut team

The conditions are not exactly the same, as the astronauts will still feel weight due to their suits.

Similarly the pull of the water as they are practicing tasks like repairing and maintaining equipment, or testing hardware compatibility, would be different to if there was truly zero gravity.

The massive tank, which can be found at Nasa's Sonny Carter Training Facility in Houston Texas, has been used by astronauts training for space missions for more than 30 years, including those going to the International Space Station (ISS) .

Future ISS training is still planned for the shallower end of the pool, while Artemis astronauts will train at the very bottom in their simulated lunar environment.