NASA scientist leads Mars crew to Devon

SARA MINOGUE

Funding hold-ups and high winds have complicated this year’s field season, but the leader of the NASA Haughton-Mars Project on Devon Island says scientific research this summer is going ahead as planned.

Last week, Dr. Pascal Lee outlined his plans for the eighth field season of Mars research in the High Arctic. He was speaking from a hotel in Resolute Bay, a 40-minute flight south of Devon Island, where he had been stuck for three extra days due to weather.

The field season is short on Devon Island, and the funding delays at NASA put the project two weeks behind schedule this year.

Lee attributes part of this delay to the Columbia space shuttle crash last year, which “disturbed” NASA’s budget, but says the team is “catching up very nicely on all of our programs.”

NASA, the Canadian Space Agency, and a number of private groups and corporations all give money to research at the Haughton Crater.

Lee is a planetary scientist at the U.S.-based SETI Institute and NASA’s Ames Research Centre in California.

According to the SETI Institute’s Web Site, SETI conducts scientific research on life in the universe with an emphasis on SETI, that is, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

Lee, who first visited Devon Island in 1997, has two main goals in mind for research at the Mars-like area this year: to conduct geological research to better understand Mars, and to use the project site as a testing and training site for future Mars explorations.

A geologist is studying the gullies that line the crater’s walls.

“The ones on Devon look very much like the gullies on Mars and we’re very intrigued by that,” Lee said.

Lee said NASA scientists have used some of the photos taken on Devon Island to help understand some of the features photographed on that planet by the Mars Rover earlier this year.

Dry lake beds inside the crater, believed to mimic the lake beds recently discovered on the red planet, are also under investigation.

“The crater no longer has a lake but it had in the past a complex lake system inside the bowl of the crater and at the bottom of these ancient lakes, lake sediments were deposited. They would be 23 million years old. That’s the age of the crater and therefore of the lake. It’s very interesting,” Lee said.

A third study is looking at the geological evolution of the crater – or “how the environment changed on the geological time scale, rather than the time scale of global warming… We’re talking about the past millions of years.”

On the exploration front, researchers and the “crew” of the Flashline Mars Research Station will be testing out a new space suit designed by NASA and Hamilton Sundstrand.

“Over the past year we’ve brought up every summer a space suit that had a hard rigid top body part. This year we’re experimenting with a space suit that has a soft upper body part,” Lee said.

“The whole idea is to put ourselves, biologists, geologists, the scientists and also the flight surgeon that we have with us, and also some students, including from Nunavut, in the space suit to see how comfortable it is to do work in that environment.”

Another mission is to test a new, automatic soil-sampling device that could be used in future robotic missions to Mars.

Lee said the terrain on Devon Island is “a good stand-in” for the terrain such a device would encounter on Mars and the earth that the sampler is drilling into ressembles materials on Mars.

Finally, researchers will continue to use new field vehicles, including the famous HMVV, a converted military ambulance that has a cab in the back where “astronauts” can spend the night.

According to Lee, it’s all part of working towards “a big picture of exploration strategies” for future Mars missions.

Also planned for this summer is an upgrade to the temporary space camp that has housed researchers over the years.

“Rather than putting our tents up every year, we’re going to leave them up year round. That’s because we are connecting all the tents to a central core, a wooden, pre-fabricated structure so the whole configuration of the space camp will look like a moon base. It’s like a star-shaped formation – actually an octagon.”

The Mars Rover has helped renew interest, and wonder, in the exploration of outer space, Lee says, and is an example of how quickly the field of space exploration has already evolved.

“The Mars Rover is the present state of Mars exploration,” Lee said. “Our research is the future state of exploration on Mars. It’s fair to say that Nunavut, in terms of space exploration, is one step ahead.”

On July 21, the camp set up a new satellite communications system with high-speed Internet access.

Enthusiasts can now follow events at the camp, in progress through August 6, at: www.marsonearth.org.