Dear diary: another day in the life on Mars

21.08.2023 - 12:02 / theunconventionalgardener.com / guest

Header image: Suited up to simulate the conditions of working outside on Mars. Jonathan Clarke (the author, left) with visiting engineer Michael Curtis-Rouse, from UK Space Agency (right). Jonathan Clarke personal collection, Author provided.

By Jonathan Clarke, UNSW

On June 16 Jonathan Clarke is starting a return journey to Mars. Not the real red planet, but a simulated Martian life in the polar desert of Devon Island in the Canadian Arctic.

It’s all part of a project to see what some of the challenges are, should humans one day decide to live on Mars. Jonathan has already spent a total of five months in simulated Martian camps, and he’s detailed some of the events as they happened across 85 Martian days of his most recent experience late last year.

Our party has “landed” after an eventful two-day drive from NASA’s Ames Research Center, near San Francisco, to the Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS) in Utah. MDRS is a simulated Mars station built and operated by The Mars Society for Mars research and education. The core is the habitat module, a two-deck cylinder eight metres high and eight metres in diameter.

It’s good to be back at MDRS; this is my fourth time here since 2003. Most of our Mars 160 crewmates are already here. We are a diverse crew of experienced expeditioners; all of us have been to MDRS before or taken part in similar expeditions elsewhere. All of us know at least one other person in the crew.

There’s Alex our commander and a French engineer; Claude-Michell, a Canadian engineer; Yusuke, a Japanese architect; Anastasiya, a Russian journalist; and from Australia, Annalea (a writer and artist) and myself (a geologist). Our biologist, Anushree from India, will join us in a few days. We are all supervised by