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But there’s more! The mine itself is an extreme and alien environment. It’s rocky, dark, hot, and very dusty – certainly not the sort of place a robot wants to be! Therefore, the underground environment is a fantastic place for benchmarking and testing space technologies, including Mars rovers and equipment for looking for life on other planets.

We use the lab’s Outside Experimentation Area within the mine tunnels to put the Remote3 rovers to the test.

We know so little about the universe and how it works. We know that ‘matter’ - the stuff that atoms, rocks, humans… ‘everything’ is made of, is but a few percent of the ‘everything’ which makes up the universe. But what is the rest? It’s been called dark matter and dark energy, but what is it really? We don’t know, but we’d love to find out!

Researchers at Edinburgh are trying to solve this in many ways, one being to build and operate incredibly sensitive detectors deep underground in places like Boulby (where annoying background signals found on the surface can be escaped). Other Edinburgh scientists are using telescopes and satellites to see the impact dark matter and dark energy has on the shape and movement of stars and galaxies. Still other researchers try to make new dark matter using high energy accelerators at places like CERN.

At the truly fundamental level, it turns out we don’t really understand much about normal matter either. Why does nature consist of the particles it does? Why do they interact with each other in the way they do?  How do they combine, and why do those combinations end up producing all the wonderful variety that we see? From the complexity and wonder of life, to how to make a truly tasty ice-cream, and just about everything in-between Edinburgh physicists are trying to learn more.