NASA Will Test Martian Environments on Earth

In late November, a team of NASA experts will head to the Dry Valleys region of Antarctica, which is a place where conditions resemble those of certain areas on the Red Planet. The research is being conducted in anticipation of a return mission to Mars.

The University Valley was selected as the best place to test the behavior of humans and machines, and their potential response to living on our neighboring planet. This region is a part of the Dry Valleys.

The reason why NASA decided to conduct its IceBite project there is because the area has many of the properties that the Phoenix Mars Lander discovered in the northern plains of the Martian arctic.

The lander made its way to the landing site in 2008, and it managed to discover that ice lies just beneath a thin layer of sand. The University Valley features a type of soil that resembles this.

Because of low temperatures in the area, the ice that is buried underground in this region never melts. This means that the ground above is always dry, similarly to how the Martian dust is always dry above the planet's ice sheet.

The Phoenix landing site is one of the main candidates for a return mission to Mars, and so the IceBite project is very important for the American space agency's long-term space exploration plans.

As the research activities develop, Astrobiology Magazine will keep a close eye on what the NASA science mission is doing, and will post online updates regularly.

“Everywhere in the northern hemisphere where there's permafrost, it is wet and it gets muddy in the summer,” explains research scientist Chris McKay, who is a part of the IceBite initiative.

He also holds an appointment as a planetary scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center, in Moffett Field, California. The expert is the principal investigator of the agency's IceBite team, too.

“In Antarctica, and only in Antarctica, we find a completely different phenomenon called dry permafrost, in which we find ice-cemented ground on top of which we find dry, bone dry soil, and the whole system never gets warm enough for that ice to turn to liquid,” he explains.

This research initiative was made possible by grant money secured from the ASTEP (Astrobiology Science and Technology for Exploring Planets) program, which is operated by NASA.

During the investigation, the scientists will test methods of analyzing soils and chemical compositions of rocks. When on Mars, such techniques will be used by scientists to collect relevant samples from various locations, Space reports.