PALO ALTO, California -- NASA and the Mars Society are joining forces to build a Mars simulation expedition in a deep impact crater on Canada's Devon Island.
The crater, the size of West Virginia, is in Polar Bear country, near the Arctic Circle, and its harsh environment is the closest thing to Mars scientists have found on Earth.
While NASA has no current plans to send a human expedition to Mars, the Mars Society is hoping that the research may persuade the space agency to change its mind.
"French oceanographer Jacques Cousteau made an underwater movie of the deep before he got funding for his deep sea projects," said Robert Zubrin, co-founder of the Mars Society and author of The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet. "This is our movie. We want to show people that a human expedition to Mars is not only possible but necessary."
NASA's objectives for the project are considerably less ambitious.
"We want to use the crater, which was created 23 million years ago, for research into all sorts of space exploration," said Pascal Lee, a planetary scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center.
Work on the US$1.2 million Mars Arctic Research Station will begin in the summer of 2000. The station will house six scientists, a workshop for all-terrain space vehicles, a solar panel array to provide power, even a small greenhouse where inhabitants can grow vegetables.
"The station will operate for four months of the year and will act as a test bed for life support equipment," said Zubrin. "It's also the ideal environment to train astronauts and conduct a research program on how to do science on Mars."
