Asclepios: Shooting for the Moon!

Eléonore Poli, analogue astronaut and commander of the Asclepios mission © Jamani Caillet / 2021 EPFL As part of the Asclepios project, a simulated mission to the Moon run by EPFL students, six would-be astronauts spent over a week living on a mock lunar base. Their extraterrestrial habitat was actually right here on Earth - at the Grimsel Test Site, to be precise. Here we look back on an adventure that was (almost) out of this world. In early July, a group of students from EPFL and other universities embarked on a mission to the Moon. Except the six-strong team - three women and three men - never actually left Earth. Instead, the would-be astronauts spent over a week living on a mock lunar base at a top-secret location as part of Asclepios, a project designed by students for students. The setting for the analog mission was the Grimsel Test Site, a network of tunnels deep beneath the Bernese Alps in western Switzerland.