fmars.marssociety.orgFMARS – Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station – Analogue research base owned by The Mars Society an

Home Our Mission The FMARS The Crew Science / Research Mission Support Home Our Mission The FMARS The Crew Science / Research Mission Support A unique Mars exploration analogue research facility Follow our mission as we develop the knowledge that will prove critical for human safety and productivity on the surface of Mars. About the Mission About the FMARS Meet the Crew A unique Mars exploration analogue research facility Follow our mission as we develop the knowledge that will prove critical for human safety and productivity on the surface of Mars. About the Mission About the FMARS Updates MEET THE CREW Our crews at FMARS are required to conduct a sustained program of geological, microbiological and climatological field exploration in a cold and dangerous remote environment while operating under many of the same constraints that a human crew would face on Mars. It is only under these conditions, where the crew is trying hard to get real scientific work done, while dealing with bulky equipment, cold, danger, discomfort, as well as isolation, that the real stresses of a human Mars mission can be encountered, and the methods for dealing with them mastered. It is only under these conditions that all sorts of problems that Mars explorers will face can be driven into the open so they can be dealt with. Only by doing these missions can we make ourselves ready to go to Mars. Nothing like this has ever been done before. Dr. Robert Zubrin President, The Mars Society Mission Updates Mars160 FMARS Final Mission Report In Final Mission Report Posted August 16, 2017 Hello from Mars, 火星からこんにちは (Kasei kara konnichiwa), Привет с Марса (Privet s Marsa), मंगल ग्रह से नमस्ते (Mangal grah se Namaste), Salutations Martiennes, This is the final expedition of the Mars 160 program. We are 6 people living in the F-MARS, in the High Arctic, far from home. Over here we can only rely on ourselves. The nearest city is Resolute Bay, 1 hour of flight from the station. We have this unique opportunity to sojourn in one of the greatest Mars analog environment on Earth! Mars atmosphere is quite cold and Polar climate is similar. Patterned ground features, characteristic of the permafrost, are observed here and there. On Mars, you would find impact craters in various size and age. Haughton crater is 15 km in diameter and 39 million years old. The station sit on its edge. However, unlike Mars, this place is populated by living extremophile organisms. But some of them could be the key to the survival of the first Mars settlers or to find past life on this planet! Our goal is to experience some of the remoteness of Mars to learn how to conduct field science operation in such conditions. The scientific investigations are diverse and ambitious. Life 30 days in Arctic felt like 80 days in Utah desert. Time stretched here and we are adjusting to the environment, just as the humans will do on Mars. By looking at the landscape, almost nothing reminds us of Earth. No signs of any civilization. No signs of life. Just as it will be on Mars. FMARS station showed us vividly how it would feel like to live and work in the alien world. Resources are also more limited here than at MDRS, especially power. This imposes a limit on what we do and when we do it. To conserve fuel, the generator is ran 9 hours a day, with gaps up to two hours. When the generator is off, there is no heater, no comms, no cooking. Hopefully we all have laptops that can ran for few hours on the battery, allowing us to keep working. During comms windows, Internet is our only regular way to communicate. Satellite based communication imposes new constraints on how we use it. The bandwidth of few kB/s and the latency rarely below few seconds, if not losing the satellite signal, does not allow us for much more than emailing with the remote team and our relatives. Unlike the MDRS journeys, we are self-sufficient regarding the water supply which is fetched from a river few hundred meters down the hill. However, we arrived at the station with the food we would get for the entire mission. As the end of the expedition approaches we have seen our food supplies shrinking. Even with safety margin, it is a strange feeling to have noticed that we are actually limited in food supply. This is not something we usually experienced in our regular life. Therefore, we are taking care that nothing got wasted! The Arctic is a much more extreme environment than Utah. Our operations have to be much more autonomous and self-sufficient on a day to day basis. Communications are more limited, requiring independence of thought and action. This is not a bad thing, with a crew of competent, motivated people this is actually liberating. It does, however, mean that more time must be spent on basic Hab tasks, underlying the importance of automation to crewed missions to Mars and elsewhere. Being in an extreme environment means that safety considerations come first. There is a greater awareness when we are on EVA of distance from the Hab and the instability of the weather. After this expedition got delayed by more than 3 weeks due to bad weather and ground conditions that prevented us to land on schedule, the mission objectives had to be redefined under the new time constraints. Therefore, no engineering project is conducted during this expedition. The unique features of the field gives priority to the field science activities over all the rest. That is why we have directed all our efforts to fulfill as many field science objectives as we can. Geology The month at FMARS has been a very valuable experience for us in that it has better equipped us to assess previous Mars analogue research at Haughton crater and provided an opportunity for our own investigations. Part of what makes FMARS an ideal Mars analog facility is its location in a periglacial environment along the rim of an ancient impact crater. This is a rare setting to have on Earth, but it is repeated planet-wide on Mars. Based on observations by the Phoenix mission in 2008, the role of water ice permafrost in the formation of periglacial features on Mars was confirmed making many periglacial processes on Earth a direct analog for Mars. This provides an opportunity to study some of the younger geological processes that are active on Mars today, right here on Earth. One periglacial feature that is common between Mars and Earth is patterned ground. Formed as a result of expansion and contraction from freezing and melting permafrost, over time this process etches patterns into the ground ranging from a few meters to several tens of meters across. When comparing satellite images of the patterned ground in Haughton Crater to patterned ground on Mars, it is easy to see why these are such intriguing subjects to study near FMARS. Over the course of Mars 160, dozens of samples have been collected from a variety of patterned ground types that once analyzed in a laboratory setting back on Earth will shed new insights into how these landforms evolve. By performing most of these field tasks in-sim as weather conditions allowed, it also provided insight into how a crewed mission might investigate similar features on Mars in the future. The results from this investigation will ultimately be submitted for peer-review in an applicable professional journal. We have been able to collect extensive imagery of the Devon Island landscape that will enable me to refine the regolith landscape mapping methodologies previously developed for cold climate landscapes. Especially valuable have been the landscape features poorly expressed at previous study sites, such as different types of polygons, and a greater appreciation of role of near-surface hydrology in Arctic landscapes. The bedrock geology of the rim of Haughton crater near the FMARS station is composed on the Allen Bay Formation. Two main facies (rock types with similar characteristics) are present, a dark brown dolostone and a white dolostone. The dark brown facies is rich in ...