Rock-strewn craters, dry river beds, pancake-flat deserts — in many ways the Australian Outback looks more like Mars than Earth. With this in mind, a convoy of Mars Society researchers is crisscrossing the Outback, looking for a place to establish a research base to prepare for manned space missions to the Red Planet. Among other things, Mars researchers plan to study more deeply the Outback’s geology and its hot-spring bacterial life, as well as use its scorching, inhospitable vastness to test space suits, communications systems and extraterrestrial four-wheelers.