In the desert in the western United States, a group of scientists simulates life on Mars
By: By Blaine Harden *
Dr. Robert Zubrin, founder of the Mars Society, at the Mars Desert Research Station in Hanksville, Utah. Mock Disaster Reports
In the red rock desert west of the small town of Hanksville in Utah USA, six people live in a structure that looks like a corn silo and smells of their dirty socks. They have come to a place suitable for unusual activity. The Mormon Ebenezer Hanks came here in the 80s to implement a way of life Polygamous, and no one stood in his way at the time. The six current pilgrims conduct an even stranger experiment here - Simulating life on Mars.
They go out into the desert in white spacesuits made of canvas, the edges of which are sticky tape. Their helmets are made from plastic bags and trash can lids. In the living unit (the silo-like structure) they lean over their portable computers for many hours into the cold desert night, typing reports on simulated disasters. "The wind blew out the roof porthole," wrote in his diary last week Dr. Bion Grieger, the commander of the operation and an astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute for Aeronautics, which is based in Germany. Grieger wrote the words after winds at a speed of 100 km/h ripped the doors and windows from the residential unit, exposing the residents to the dangers the nature "Fortunately," Grieger wrote, "even high-speed winds would not cause much damage on Mars, since the air pressure is much lower than on Earth."
The pretense of simulating life on Mars from a tall tin can in southern Utah is the latest step in a private initiative, the goal of which is to convince the federal government to send humans to Mars sooner and at a lower cost than NASA authorities are planning. from 5,000 countries, many of whom are space scientists and some of whom hold senior positions in NASA - requests to launch Men and women to Mars in the next decade, at a cost of 29 billion dollars. This amount is much lower than the space agency's estimates.
NASA has previously announced that it will not even consider launching a manned mission to Mars before 2020, the year in which an unmanned space shuttle is planned to make a flight to the planet and back. The Mars Association admits that it will be difficult to carry out the mission without the government's assistance, but it claims that there is great image and research value to the attempt of scientists to pretend they live on a planet 60 million km from Earth.
The slogan of the Mars Association is "save equipment and live off the land". The association's main method for cutting the costs of flying to Mars is to produce fuel while on the planet. Their intention is to dilute the air on Mars, which consists mostly of carbon dioxide, with hydrogen to prepare fuel for the journey back home. "People interested in flying to Mars have the means to pay for the operation, assuming we manage to mobilize their support," said Dr. Robert Zubrin, space engineer and founder of the association, in a telephone interview from his office in Denver. "On our way to achieving this goal, we decided to start small."
The modest unit is part of Zubrin's master plan to mobilize the support of capitalists. The unit, the construction of which was invested in about one million dollars raised in private donations to the association, is the second of four planned stations (the first opened in the Arctic Circle in 2000) whose purpose is to teach biologists, geologists, engineers and physicists how to work together in a Mars-like site, without taking each other out of the tools.
The site where the unit was established, in a desolate corner in the western United States, bears an astonishing resemblance to the footage from Mars that was transmitted to Earth by various unmanned missions of the American Space Agency. Hollywood production workers arrived at the site at the time on behalf of James Cameron, the director of the movie "Titanic." Cameron, An avid Mars enthusiast, he had previously considered making a film about the planet.Following the discovery of the site, he approached Zubrin, who set up the winter residence there The latter. The unit was officially opened on February 7, under the title "Mars Desert Exploration Station".
"The appearance of the place is very important from an image point of view," said Greger, the commander of the third round of scientists at the site. Scientists from all over the world come to the remote station for a two-week stay. The view, reminiscent of outer space, has already attracted news crews from the US, Germany and the UK to Hanksville, and many more are making their way to the scene.
The six scientists now staying at the research station said that their most important task is probably to arouse interest and sympathy in public opinion, and to promote the public relations of the project. This is the most economical way, they agreed, to create a broad base of support for sending humans to Mars. They also agree that no such basis exists today.
"Kids these days have never seen a moon landing," said Nell Biddle, the station's deputy commander and an expert in marine geology. "It's a bit sad. They don't even think that manned interstellar flight is a possibility." Like her colleagues on the station, Biddle was an avid space enthusiast since childhood, who wanted more than anything to fly to Mars. She bought her first telescope at the age of 9, taught herself to navigate in space at the age of 10 and at the age of 14 participated in a science fair where she presented a project on the geology of Mars.
Indeed, living in the visualization of Mars requires great enthusiasm. The rooms of the living unit are a kind of tight closets and have no windows (except for the commander's room, which has a window). The participants in the experiment shower once every four days. When the wind blows in a certain direction, the smell of the unit's chemical toilets wafts into the upper room, where everyone cooks, eats and writes reports. Their meals are cooked on a portable stove.
Despite their passion for space, the team members doubt the chances of participating in a real space flight. Sybil Sharvel, for example, a water engineer from the University of Colorado who is participating in the experiment, is too short to be an astronaut according to the standards of the space agency - she is 1.60 meters tall. Jonathan Dury, an engineer from the Johnson Space Center in Houston, is too tall - he is 2 meters tall. Commander Griger has a stomach dysfunction, which would have disqualified him from flying in space. The ground station—definitely, then—is the closest thing to interstellar flight that the members of the temporary crew will get.
New York Times. Published in "Haaretz". The knowledge site was at that time part of the IOL portal
