What makes an environment Mars-like? It needs to be remote and extreme, have no vegetation, and be dry and rocky with freezing temperatures.
Way up in Arctic Canada, there’s a place that meets all of these qualifications. When an asteroid or comet slammed into the area 39 million years ago, it created Haughton Crater. This 20-km-wide impact crater is the only one in a polar desert and it has been very well preserved.
Every summer since 1997, the Haughton-Mars Project has been conducting numerous missions at this crater on Devon Island. Both international and multidisciplinary, the summer missions are applicable to human missions not only to Mars but to the Moon and other planetary bodies as well.
In the environment of Haughton Crater, robots have been tested for their ability to explore a site after humans have been there and left. By exploring an area after humans have vacated it, robots are effective follow-up collectors of data. This robotic completion of humans’ work has the potential to collect more data and for the data collection to be of a greater quality.
When humans have to move into their spacesuits to conduct extravehicular activities (EVAs), it’s important to protect them from contaminants. A spacesuit port was developed by Hamilton Sundstrand and tested at Haughton Crater so that humans would be able to transition from a pressurized vehicle to a spacesuit while keeping dust from infiltrating the vehicle.
Other studies have evaluated the microbial impact from humans on the crater (which was shown to be negligible), demonstrated the importance of having more than one vehicle on long-duration roving missions, and have also led to an advanced drill being developed that proved its ability to sense possible failures and fix itself by carrying out recovery actions.
The research and important findings of the Haughton-Mars Project continue to help us learn more about other planetary bodies and how to explore them. The project is part of NASA’s Analog Missions which help us prepare for future missions to asteroids, the Moon, and Mars.
Learn more about the Haughton-Mars Project at NASA.gov.