068 / / JANUARY 2017
s yet, no human knows what it’s like to live
on Mars, but Dr Beth Healey has more of an
idea than most. As a research doctor with the
European Space Agency, 29-year-old Healey
spent a year in an Antarctic region so remote that it’s the only
place on Earth where people are as isolated as astronauts.
It takes longer to reach than the International Space Station
(ISS) and is known as White Mars. There, she braved subzero
temperatures, endured 24-hour darkness and was cut off for
months on end without any way to leave. What drew her, like
previous generations of explorers, was not a quest for gold, oil
or minerals, but something even more valuable: knowledge.
Healey was part of a group of 13 men and women who had
been picked to live and work for 12 months on the Concordia
base. Over the short summer period, this French-Italian
station is home to about 60 technicians and scientists of
all nationalities, including glaciologists, astronomers and
climatologists. But as winter approaches, they return home
and a skeleton crew is left to man the station. Temperatures
can fall to -80°C, and the sun vanishes for more than 105 days.
Scientists have found that the psychological and
physiological challenges of surviving the Polar winter are
similar to those experienced by astronauts on the ISS.
Healey’s job was to monitor the group, and her research will
be used to assess how people might perform on future
missions to the moon, Mars and beyond. It was a daunting
task but, as Healey knew, the biggest challenge would
come not from the intense research or the lethal cold,
but from the total isolation, and the pressure of living and
working with 12 complete strangers in such extreme
conditions. This is her account of life on White Mars.
EXPERIMENTS IN ICE-OLATION
Conditions on Concordia are so extreme that not even
bacteria can survive. ‘One of my experiments was to try to
find some that could,’ says Dr Healey, ‘because they might
also then survive on Mars. I knew that in 2014, scientists
successfully revived mosses that had been frozen in the
permafrost for 1,500 years. Sadly, though, I didn’t find any
bacteria that could survive. But, personally, I think there
must be life on Mars, or somewhere else in the universe.’A
The extreme conditions
and isolation make the
Antarctic winter
the perfect test-bed
for a mission to Mars