Could the Moon Become Our Next Home?
More than fifty years after Apollo, Dimitra Atri is asking a harder question — not whether humans can visit the Moon, but whether they can stay.
At the NYU Abu Dhabi Space Exploration Laboratory, Principal Investigator Atri is helping prepare for the UAE’s return to the lunar surface, tackling the challenges that could determine whether humans can one day live and work beyond Earth.
His team is focused on three problems that will be critical to making that possible: whether life’s chemical building blocks can survive on the Moon, how lunar dust damages equipment, and how radiation affects astronauts.
The lab has developed three experiments for the Emirates Lunar Mission. One will test ideas Atri has explored through computer models and data from orbiters and rovers.
“I have spent years modeling radiation and surface chemistry on worlds we could only observe from orbit or through rover data,” he says. “Now we get to send our own experiment, which we designed and built ourselves, and test our ideas directly on the lunar surface. That is a rare privilege for any planetary scientist.”
For Atri, the mission is more than a scientific milestone; it shows how Abu Dhabi’s research can contribute directly to global space exploration.
