Will astronauts live in caves? ESA chooses Lanzarote to imagine how

The International Conference on Planetary Caves, organized for four years by the European Space Agency, the Lunar Institute, and the world's most advanced universities in this field, will meet in 2023 for the first time in a cave... specifically, in Lanzarote.

For several years, the ESA has taken this island as a training ground for its astronauts to train them in geology and test exploration techniques designed for the Moon and Mars, due to the multiple similarities between its lava and volcanic slag fields and the next two targets of the space race.

In several of these training sessions in Lanzarote, both the ESA and NASA have been interested not only in the surface of places like Timanfaya National Park or the Tinguatón volcano, but also in the subsoil, in the caves, and in particular, in the spectacular volcanic tube of La Corona, formed 25,000 years ago.

And this is due to two certainties shared by the scientific community: the caves existing on the Moon and Mars can offer refuge to astronauts on the day that space agencies launch to build bases in those places, because they are places safe from solar radiation; and they can also be an ideal place to look for traces of present or past life, for the same reason.

Precisely that is what the international experts who will attend the fourth Planetary Caves Conference will be discussing from May 4 to 7 in Haría, as announced by the ESA via Twitter.

On the table will be issues such as the exploration of the subsoil of the Moon and Mars and the scientific potential offered by the mouths of the caves, the possibility of searching for underground volatiles and determining the habitability of the subsoil, or the opportunity to investigate whether the caverns on other planets can harbor life and, incidentally, consider what technology and what architecture would be necessary to make them habitable for humans.

In addition, the conference will serve as a forum to discuss the proposals of ongoing missions for space agencies and the long-term goal of developing a strategy for the robotic exploration of caves throughout the solar system.

All of this will be discussed in different working groups at the La Tegala socio-cultural center in Haría. But the plenary sessions will take place in the Jameos del Agua, in that segment of the volcanic tube of La Corona that the genius of César Manrique turned into one of the most spectacular auditoriums in the world.