Expedition to "Mars on Earth"

Logistics Spectrum, Jan-Mar 2005 by Silver, Matthew R, de Weck, Olivier L

Reprinted by permission of the MIT Faculty Newsletter, Vol. XVIII No. 1, September/October 2005.

There will always be some disagreement about the ideal place to summer. While many note that Cape Cod combines convenience and style, others insist that a more northern location, perhaps the coast of Maine, is preferable. A team of researchers from the MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics and the Engineering Systems Division decided to take this argument to its logical conclusion by conducting a field expedition to the remote Haughton Mars Project (HMP) research base, a few hundred miles from the magnetic North Pole.

The expedition was conducted as part of an Interplanetary Supply Chain Management project, funded by NASA and led by MIT Professors Olivier de Weck and David SimchiLevi. The central goal for the arctic field season, which lasted from July 8 to August 6, 2005, was to investigate the similarities between logistics for remote terrestrial sites and supply chains for future planetary Moon and Mars exploration for modeling purposes. Another objective was to deploy and test technologies such as Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) for remote base operations.

The MIT team conducted this research in cooperation with the Haughton Mars Project (www.marsonearth.org), an international interdisciplinary field research project sponsored by NASA and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) and managed by the Mars Institute. The site is focused on the scientific study of the 38-million-year-old Haughton impact crater and surrounding terrain on Devon Island.

At 75 degrees North latitude, Devon Island is a high arctic desert and the largest uninhabited island on Earth. The site was chosen both for its geological and scientific interest, and its similarity to Mars terrain. While no climate on Earth is exactly like Mars, the unique combination of rocky polar desert, permafrost, and analogous geological formations, afford comparisons to the possible evolution of Mars - in particular the history of water and of past climates, the effects of impacts on Earth and other planets, and the possibilities and limits for life in remote environments.

Beyond basic science, the remote Haughton Mars site functions as an analogue planetary base, supporting a diverse array of exploration technology and engineering test projects that also benefit from the Mars-analogue terrain, remoteness, and exploration-like activities undertaken by geologists and other scientists. For example, over the past several years, the Canadian Space Agency has supported the Arthur C. Clark Greenhouse project, to design, build, and test a greenhouse and autonomous plant-growth technologies in remote environments. Hamilton-Sundstrand, an aerospace engineering firm headquartered in Connecticut, uses the Haughton site to test advanced space suit designs. Also, this year the Drilling Automation for Mars Exploration (DAME) project, lead by the NASA Ames Research Center, tested autonomous fault diagnosis and artificial intelligence software on a prototype Mars drill. Many other exploration technologies and prototypes have been tested at the Haughton base since 1997.

The Haughton Mars project has its origins in a 1996 National Research Council grant awarded to Dr. Pascal Lee to investigate the potential for the High Arctic to serve as an analogue for Mars exploration. Having identified Devon Island as an excellent location, NASA formally established the Haughton Mars project in 1999, with Dr. Lee as principal investigator and Dr. Kelly Snook at NASA Ames Research Center as project manager. The project has grown over the years and now supports up to sixty researchers over the six-week field season, with a variety of projects from universities, government, and industry.

The base itself has also grown, and now includes a main mess tent, a communication-systems tent, a large office and laboratory tent for general work, a greenhouse test bed, and an octagonal core module that will eventually unite the buildings into a single base-like structure. There are also roughly 20 all-terrain vehicles (ATVs), a Humvee outfitted for longer traverses, and a small airstrip to support Twin Otter airplane flights in and out of base. This year, an MIT tent was erected for the space logistics project and also in preparation for future MIT involvement at the site. As a whole, the base can currently accommodate about 40 to 50 people at a given time, with researchers sleeping in individual tents near the main structures.

The MIT expedition to the Haughton Mars Site on Devon Island was part of the NAS A-funded Human and Robotics Technology (HRT) project on "Interplanetary Supply Chain Management & Logistics Architectures." Originally, the plan was to analyze logistics for Antarctic exploration and offshore oil and gas exploration platforms. However, observing and managing the HMP logistics presented itself in early 2005 as an opportunity to deliver much more tangible and direct benefits to NASA. Not only will the project be able to closely observe and model both the micro and macro-logistics of the base, it will influence the actual logistics of the site as advances made under the project are infused into base operations.