Mary Roach - Packing for Mars

Before actual prototypes of the pressurized rovers are tested in analog settings—earthly terrain that resembles the moon’s surface—NASA is undertaking some rough cuts. These are two-day “excerpts” of fourteen-day traverses using similarly sized Earth vehicles. Simulated traverses help NASA get a hands-on sense of “performance and productivity”—how much gets done, how long things take, what works and what doesn’t. This summer, the Small Pressurized Rover [55] Six months after our traverse, NASA, recognizing a public relations opportunity, will change the name Small Pressurized Rover to Lunar Electric Rover. It was originally called the Flexible Roving Expedition Device, or FRED, until NASA Headquarters nixed it. They nixed it for the same reason they took the word Excursion out of the Apollo Lunar Excursion Module—it sounded frivolous. A larger mobile lunar habitat prototype called the All-Terrain Hex-Legged Extra-Terrestrial Explorer (ATHLETE) recently squeaked past the NASA fun censor. Whoever he is, he’s very thorough. I skimmed the entire 53-page NASA acronym list and failed to find anything amusing. (Business Manager came closest.) simulator is an orange Humvee that lives at the HMP Research Station on Devon Island in Canada’s High Arctic. (HMP stands for Haughton-Mars Project; Devon Island also resembles parts of Mars, and simulated Martian traverses have also taken place up here.)

In short, Devon Island is as close to the moon as you can come without a rocket. Twelve-mile-wide Haughton Crater is a ringer for the moon’s Shackleton Crater, upon whose rim NASA had, since 2004, been planning to establish a base. Craters are formed by strikes from meteoroids [56] A meteoroid is a bit of debris, usually planetary, hurtling through the solar system. If it’s bigger than a boulder, then it’s an asteroid. If any part of a meteoroid makes it to Earth intact rather than burning up as it barrels through Earth’s atmosphere, then it’s a meteorite. A meteoroid’s visible path through the atmosphere is a meteor. An astronaut struck by a meteoroid is a goner. A meteoroid the size of a tomato seed can pierce a spacesuit. hurtling through space at somewhere in the neighborhood of 100,000 miles per hour; with no atmospheric friction to slow them down and burn them up, as happens above Earth, even tiny ones blast holes in the moon’s surface. A pebble strike can open a crater a few feet across. Planetary scientists are fond of meteorites because they’re natural excavators, yielding access to geological material from past eras that is normally costly and difficult to get to.

Devon Island is also, like the moon or Mars, extremely inconvenient. It’s thousands of miles from the things one needs for a geology expedition. Devon is uninhabited: no electricity, no cell coverage, no port or airport or supplies. That is part of the draw. Doing science here is a lesson in extreme planning. A moon or Mars analog, rather than the orb itself, is the place to figure out that, say, three people might be a better size for an exploration party than two. Or that it takes twice as long as the mission planners thought to drive a rover over a block field or twice as much oxygen to climb the loose scree on the slope of a crater. As someone at yesterday’s pretraverse planning meeting said, “This is the place to make mistakes.”

LIKE THE MOON, Devon Island doesn’t get interesting until you start to get close. Out the window of a low-flying Twin Otter, ground that had appeared on satellite images to be dirt, straight no chaser, reveals itself to be riverine windings of tan, gray, gold, cream, rust. Polar meltwater has carved, scoured, and tinted the ground in such a way that you feel as though you’re flying over an expanse of Italian marbled paper.

Set out on foot, and you soon see why planetary geologists make their way to the top of the Earth to visit this place. There are other places where meteorites have gouged out craters the size of Haughton, but most are covered with forest or mall. The High Arctic is landscape at its most elemental: earth and sky. Radiating out from the center of Haughton Crater is an “ejecta blanket” of the same kind you find around lunar craters. When a meteoroid slams a fellow celestial body, the energy of the impact simultaneously smashes and renders molten the rock beneath. The resulting magmalike rock stew is blasted away from the impact, lands, and cools into a sort of nougat, called impact breccia (pronounced as though it were an Italian delicacy). And then sits for 39 million years until some guy in hiking boots and a space helmet comes along and picks it up.

Today there are two guys in helmets. In the driver’s seat of the Small Pressurized Rover simulator is planetary scientist and Haughton-Mars project director Pascal Lee. With support from NASA, the SETI Institute, the Mars Institute, and other partners, Lee established the HMP Research Station at Haughton Crater in 1997. Riding shotgun is Andrew Abercromby, of NASA’s EVA Physiology Systems and Performance Project. Abercromby has blond, freckled good looks that are rescued from Buzz Lightyear all-American wholesomeness by a curious silver-dollar-sized circle of white hair and a Fyfe accent. Squeezed between Lee and Abercromby is HMP intern Jonathan Nelson and Lee’s ubiquitous canine pal Ping Pong. Three all-terrain vehicles (ATVs) follow along behind the Humvee, carrying camp mechanic Jesse Weaver, spacesuit engineer Tom Chase, and me. Together we six are Small Pressurized Rover Alpha, or as “ground control” calls us, SPR-Alpha. Out on a different route, scheduled to rendezvous with us at the end of the day, are the men and women of SPR-Bravo.

We’re driving slowly, keeping to the projected 6-miles-per-hour average of the actual rover. The low, gravelly hills are more uniformly grey here than elsewhere on the island. The scenery looks a lot like the moon’s Taurus-Littrow Valley, where Apollo 17 astronauts explored by rover in 1972. Tooling along this barren terrain in a bulbous, visored ATV helmet, I find it easy, if embarrassing, to pretend I’m on the moon. Lee’s evident excitement over the excursion—“Can you believe I get paid for this, barely?”—has become easier for me to understand. The place has made geeks of all of us.

Except our mechanic. Weaver never looks around to admire the scenery. I do, almost constantly. Yesterday, I came within inches of slamming the back of the ATV in front of me. Lunar scenery was a potentially dangerous distraction during Apollo landings. Concerned mission planners built gawp time into the minute-by-minute schedules. “We’re allowed two quick looks out the window,” Gene Cernan reminded Harrison Schmitt as they prepared to descend to the moon’s surface during Apollo 17.

Lee stops the Humvee and consults the GPS. We’ve reached our first “way point.” It’s a geology pit stop: don spacesuits, climb a bluff, collect samples. Lee and Abercromby are standing outside the vehicle, fiddling with their communications headsets, which enable them to speak to each other and to “ground control,” back at the HMP base. Around the rear of the Humvee, Chase has laid out simulated suit components on two mats. If this were the actual rover, the suits would be hanging off a pair of suit ports cut into the vehicle’s rear panels. The astronauts would step into them from inside the rover, twist their torsos to unlock suit from port, and walk away. And then reverse the process when they return, leaving their suits dangling like shed exoskeletons. This way the suits don’t clutter the cramped interior, and no dust gets inside.

Dust is the lunar astronaut’s nemesis. With no water or wind to smooth them, the tiny, hard moon rock particles remain sharp. They scratched faceplates and camera lenses during Apollo, destroyed bearings, clogged equipment joints. Dusting on the moon is a fool’s errand. Unlike on the Earth, where the planet’s magnetic field wards off charged particles of solar wind, these particles bombard the moon’s surface and impart an electrostatic charge. Moon dust clings like dryer socks. Astronauts who stepped from the Lunar Module in gleaming white marshmallow suits returned a few hours later looking like miners. The Apollo 12 suits and long johns became so filthy that at one point, astronaut Jim Lovell told me, the crew “took off all their underwear and they were naked for half the way home.”