Mission: impossible?

Could people survive on Mars? An Irish scientist has been trying to find out, reports Dick Ahlstrom

The first manned flight to Mars won't happen for decades, but "space travellers" are already trying to simulate what things might be like on the Red Planet. A full scale mock-up of a six- person Mars "habitat" in the Mojave Desert, in Utah, is giving planners an idea of how humans might cope.

Dr Derek O'Keeffe of the biomedical electronics laboratory at the University of Limerick was selected from 5,000 applicants to join Astronaut Crew Rotation XV at the Mars Desert Research Station. He lived the life of an explorer on Mars, making trips outside the habitat in a NASA space suit and eating, sleeping and working in the confines of a duplicate Mars lander.

The Mars Society, an international group, is behind the Mars Desert Research Center and a twin facility on Devon Island, in the Arctic Circle. Two more are planned for Iceland's lava flows and for the Australian outback. They are meant to provide highly accurate and disciplined simulations of how travellers to Mars might live and work, explains O'Keeffe.

"You go to this place to be in simulation, and there is no point in going all the way out to the Mojave Desert without staying in simulation," he says. "If you stay in you get better results and better science for everyone."

Break the rules or take shortcuts and you are out, he says. Any task outside the habitat, or hab, as the six-person team called it, required a full briefing and suit-up procedure, with a formal desuiting and debriefing afterwards. The crew followed the standard NASA procedures applied for any trip by astronauts outside the space shuttle.

The goal is to gain insights into making life easier for a planned trip to Mars in the coming decades, explains O'Keeffe. Each participant had a role to play, and his or her feedback becomes part of the planning for a real trip.

This crew rotation consisted of four men and two women, including a geologist and his wife-- who acted as the group's archivist and journalist--a computer specialist, a biologist and astronomer, a flight commander and, as chief engineer, O'Keeffe.

He spent from March 16th to 29th in the simulator, as a result experiencing his first St Patrick's day on Mars, in a manner of speaking. It was amazingly like home, he says, given that it rained on the 17th despite being out in the desert.

O'Keeffe's lab in Limerick specialises in the use of electronics in a biological setting. "The idea of the research centre is to apply electronic engineering to biomedical problems," he says. He gives the example of electrically stimulating stroke victims' muscles to help improve mobility. The laboratory also uses advanced sensors to analyse movement patterns in patient groups.

These two areas, muscular stimulation and movement analysis, helped O'Keeffe get selected for the Mars simulator. He suggested a research project that would analyse astronaut movement as a way to measure crew exertion levels and to devise exercise routines to help prevent muscle and bone wastage. "It tied in nicely with the research we were doing here with the patient groups."

He used simple pedometers to monitor the number of steps the other five crew members took on a given day, an indication of gross mobility patterns. He collected more accurate assessments of periods spent standing, sitting or lying using very sensitive axial acceleration sensors.

These monitored and recorded movements with tiny accelerometers that used a fixed and free plate connected by a fine spring. An electrical potential between the two plates varied as the spring reacted to movements by shifting the plates closer or farther apart. Measurements were taken inside and outside the hab as the crew simulated what real astronauts would do on a visit to Mars.

O'Keeffe describes the hab as being like a two-storey tuna can, but he enjoyed the trip. "The two weeks I was there flew. I met an awful lot of interesting people." Each crew member had separate sleeping quarters, but all had to share the tedious cooking, cleaning and trash details ordered by the commander.

Water was in short supply, as it would be on Mars, with a maximum of about eight gallons shared by everyone each day. They had to learn to take infrequent 20-second "navy showers", and waste water from washing was recycled in an associated greenhouse, to grow crops.

"This was the kind of science that would make people want to get involved in science and engineering," says O'Keeffe.