Inhospitable desert plays Mars in Red Planet simulation
Dressed in stark white spacesuits against the backdrop of a desolate, auburn terrain of stony plains and sand dunes, two scientists test a georadar by dragging the flat box across the rocky sand.
Communication from mission command in the Alps is delayed ten minutes, so when the georadar stops working, the two walk back to their allterrain vehicles and radio colleagues nearby at base camp for guidance.
But this isn’t the Red Planet – it’s the Arabian Peninsula.
The desolate desert in southern Oman, near the borders of Yemen and Saudi Arabia, resembles Mars so much that more than 200 scientists from 25 nations chose it as their location for the next four weeks, to field-test technology for a manned mission to Mars. Public and private ventures are racing toward Mars – both former President Barack Obama and Spacex founder Elon Musk declared humans would walk on the Red Planet in a few decades.
The successful launch of Spacex’s Falcon Heavy rocket this week “puts us in a completely different realm of what we can put into deep space, what we can send to Mars,” said analog astronaut Kartik Kumar.
While cosmonauts and astronauts are learning valuable spacefaring skills on the International Space Station in Earth orbit, the majority of work to prepare for interplanetaryexpeditionsisbeing done on Earth.
Seen from space, the Dhofar Desert is a flat, brown expanse. Few animals or plants survive in the desert expanses of the Arabian Peninsula, where temperatures can top 125 degrees Fahrenheit, or 51 degrees Celsius.
On the eastern edge of a seemingly endless dune is the Oman Mars Base: a giant 2.4-ton inflated habitat surrounded by shipping containers turned into labs and crew quarters. There are no airlocks.
The desert’s surface resembles Mars so much, it’s hard to tell the difference, Kumar said, his spacesuit caked in dust.
“But it goes deeper than that: the types of geomorphology, all the structures, the salt domes, the riverbeds, the wadis, it parallels a lot of what we see on Mars,” he said.
“You can test systems on those locations and see where the breaking points are, and you can see where things start to fail and which design option you need to take in order to assure that it does not fail on Mars,” said João Lousada, one of the Oman simulation’s deputy field commanders who is a flight controller for the International Space Station.
“The first person to walk on Mars has in fact already been born, and might be going to elementary school now,” he added.