DEVON ISLAND - It’s odd seeing fully-grown adults dressed as spacemen, wandering the polar desert of Nunavut’s High Arctic.
But that’s exactly how seven space enthusiasts are spending their summer, from May to August, when they aren’t cooped up in the Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station, a building that resembles several enormous tuna cans stacked atop each other.
The station is perched on the edge of the Haughton impact crater, which was formed when a meteorite smashed into the Earth millions of years ago. Space researchers say the crater is much like the surface of Mars and the Moon.
The Flashline crew are in the middle of a four-month, “unprecedented” mission, funded by the Mars Society, a non-profit U.S. organization that lobbies for manned missions to the Red Planet.
The crew spend most their time “in sim,” or simulation. In other words, they’re pretending to be space explorers.
Enter the Flashline station, and you’ll usually need to wait five minutes inside the “airlock,” as you would for a real space base.
Ryan Kobrick and Kathryn Bywaters walk Devon Island’s Haughton Crater “in sim,” dressed as space explorers. Behind them, Matt Barnsey serves as a polar bear monitor. (PHOTO BY JOHN THOMPSON)
The next room stores a row of mock space suits and fish-bowl helmets. Each suit features the last name of each crew member across the back, and on the right shoulder, a red, green and blue flag.
“It’s the Mars flag,” explains Ryan Kobrick, 27, an aerospace engineering graduate who is studying group behaviour as the crew’s “human factors researcher.”
It’s 10:30 p.m., and the crew has just finished lunch: leftover spaghetti, and some bean sprouts grown in the building. They eat a lot of fake chicken, beef and taco meat, and a lot of Spam.
They’re living on Martian time, which means for them it’s a little after 2:30 p.m. They move the clock back 39 minutes each day.
The interior would be easy to mistake for a college dorm. An open room on the ground floor doubles as a lab and exercise room. There’s a table with dirt samples scrunched into tin foil, a few microscopes, a clump of uprooted Arctic poppies, and a laptop computer. An exercise bike and treadmill sit in the corner.
Climb a ladder upstairs, and the rest of the crew is gathered around a table, wrapping up a meeting. There’s a plastic viking helmet lying nearby, and a squishy ball emblazoned with a picture of Toy Story’s astronaut, Buzz Lightyear, declaring, “To infinity and beyond!”
They’ve rigged up a climbing wall, which has displaced the dart board. A crocheted hacky sack lies on a table, and a frisbee from the 2004 mission hangs from a wall. Inflatable pool furniture is stowed at the top of the loft.
During their mock space walks, the crew has watched the ice melt and plants grow. They’ve studied the permafrost, and what grows near it. They’ve collected rocks they believe may harbour bacteria similar to what may live on Mars. In total, they have some 20 projects on the go.
This is done while “collaborating with a scientific team back on Earth,” explains Kim Binsted, a computer science professor from the University of Hawaii, who is the crew’s chief scientist.
This field work is done in space suits, although such walks are always done with one crew member “out of sim,” lugging a rifle in case they meet a polar bear.
“No one has done a mission for such a long duration. We get to go outside and do realistic field work. You’d be able to do a lot of the same things on Mars,” says Commander Melissa Battler, 26, a masters student in planetary geology at the University of New Brunswick.
It’s a claim that’s greeted with scepticism by Pascal Lee, the principal investigator of the nearby Haughton-Mars Project, which conducts similar space experiments. He describes the science done at the Flashline station as “high school” level, and questions whether their findings will be of much value to astronauts.
In response, Battler says her group has retained as advisors some of the same scientists who work at the HMP, such as Chris McKay, a planetary scientist with NASA, and Gordon Osinski, a geologist with the Canadian Space Agency.
She acknowledges the science produced at the Flashline in past years may not have been impressive, but this year, “definitely, the science now is of much higher calibre.”
While none of the crew have a background in psychology or sociology, they say a big part of their mission is to study themselves, and how well they cope with living in Flashline together, following many Mars-like restrictions.
No phone calls home. No surfing the web. And they wait 20 minutes before responding to any email, to replicate the time lag of transmitting data from Mars to Earth.
“I miss my family a lot,” says James Harris, chief engineer and medical officer.
They’re also studying how to conserve water, which would be a precious commodity on Mars. “You’re not going to shower every day for 30 minutes,” says Matt Barnsey, the crew’s safety officer.
“Matt showers maybe once a week,” offers Binsted.
However, they have brewed beer - if only enough for a few bottles of lager, which Kobrick says is reserved for special occasions.
Why Devon Island? There’s another, similar site used by their group in Utah. But that’s only a 10-minute drive from town, and Battler says for this mission, “one of the psychological aspects is the isolation.”
There are small comforts. Once the crew made poutine for Simon Auclair, the crew geologist, who is from Quebec.
“We figured out how to make mozzarella from powdered milk,” says Kim Binsted. “It’s kind of like squeaky cheese.”