58 | April• 2018
THE MARS FRONTIER
cylinder, eight metres in height and
width. Food is freeze-dried, dehy-
drated or tinned. Sanitation involves
plastic bags and an incinerator. Out-
side communications mimic Mars
restrictions. And venturing outdoors
requires faux spacesuits (except for
whoever’s riding shotgun for polar
bears; luckily none showed up).
“When we go outside to do our
work, we do a simulated EVA [extra-
vehicular activity] with constant radio
contact,” Clarke says. “he spacesuits
are basically costumes, but they do
isolate you from the environment.
They make work two or three times
more diicult, and when we go back
inside we go through the simulated
re-pressurisation procedure. So we
do get a good appreciation of the con-
straints of working on Mars.”
Spacesuit design is a key considera-
tion, for which the Mars Society ofers
novative ‘MarsSkin’
utits. Sleek and lex-
le, they counteract
w-pressure space
nvironments with
rm-itting elastic in-
ead of gas inflation,
e method used by
ulkier traditional
acesuits. The basic
ncept isn’t new, but
e MarsSkin applica-
on is a Mars Society
ustralia creation, tri-
lled in the South Aus-
tralian desert and nowdone four stints of up to 80 days at
the international Mars Society’s Mars
Desert Research Station in Utah, plus
less-simulated trials in outback Aus-
tralia and a high-altitude cold desert
in India. “People have been doing this
for centuries, for millennia – going of
in small groups to live and work in
remote places, exploring the frontier,”
Clarke points out. “We’re no diferent.”
he Mars Society’s frontier is a little
diferent, however. Founded in the US
in 1998 and funded largely by dona-
tion and sponsorship, the non-proit
global network (26 countries have
chapters) exists to promote human
exploration of Mars.
Not content to wait for official
space agencies, members actively ad-
vance the know-how they hope will
hasten those first human footprints
on the Red Planet. he main game is
‘Mars analogue research’ – dress re-
hearsals of Mars mis-
sions to investigate all
kinds of operational
challenges, including
psychological.
he FMARS facility is
–likeMars–aremote
cold-desert environ-
ment.Locatedonour
world’s largest unin-
habited island, it’s a
bleak treeless expanse
of permafrost, rocks
and lichen.
Home base is a
two-storey fibreglass
Dr Jonathan Clarke