Marmul terrain is very similar to the Martian surface

Then, it’s off to the field kitchen to make breakfast for all scientists and visitors, a fair number of whom are expected everyday. Kitchen shifts occur three times a day, with the quartermaster overseeing what provisions need to be finished first.

The “dining room”, a robust canvas tent with a couple of fridges, steel shelves, and camp tables, is home to a large stash of canned vegetables, Tetra pack juices and tinned meat, as well as many other staples such as pasta, crackers and cereal bars. It’s enough to feed a small battalion. Fresh food is trucked in from Salalah, but scientists know it wouldn’t take much for them to be cut off from the outside world.

“All of us have to take turns to ensure the camp is fully stocked because this is an isolated location and we cannot afford to fall short of essential items in case of an emergency,” Aline Decadi, project engineer for AMADEE 18, said.

“We have to monitor our food supplies and take turns cooking. Whenever someone takes a vehicle outside the camp, they have to inform us where they are going and how much fuel is left in the car,” she added.

“I know it is not ideal for some people, but we chose Marmul because the terrain here is very similar to that of Mars and we wanted to go off the grid so we could focus solely on the experiments. We wanted to replicate the exact facilities we would have on Mars, so that means no mobile phone or GPS systems,” Gernot Gromer, Field Commander for AMADEE 18, said.

“We narrowed it down to Oman from a number of countries, because satellite studies and geophysical publications have shown that the soil composition of Oman and the mineralogy of the desert here is very similar to that of Mars,” he added.

The researchers are connected to the outside world through shortwave radios, with a high-speed Internet connection linking them to the Mission Control Centre at OeWF headquarters in Innsbruck. Another team in Canada monitors and receives feedback from its colleagues on the ground, while a three-man team of doctors, who also doubles up as researchers for the mission, is always on the base, ready to spring into action in case of an emergency.

Tests will be conducted on a host of prototypes, including the Aouda space exploration space- suit, the Husky rover that uses laser guidance for surface mapping, sonic exploration radar devices, a mobile greenhouse to check the effectiveness of crop productivity on Mars,

and a fatigue and tension monitoring system, among others. The scientists will go into isolation from February 8 so they can pay full attention to their experiments until the end of the month.

“We began shipping our equipment to Oman in December. Then all of us who were coming here had to undergo training in Innsbruck during the last week of January,” Michael Muller, another specialist at OeWF, said.

“This is our bridgehead phase. Once we have seen that all our equipment works, we will be in isolation until the end of February,” he added.