Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS) Crew 214 – Oct 26 -Nov 10 – MSA ExBoomerang

As a food waste researcher, I’m interested in how humans prepare food, eat and manage leftovers. This interest is not just confined to Earth – it extends to other planets.

I recently spent two weeks at the Mars Desert Research Station in the US state of Utah, and experienced the intimate and challenging conditions of a Mars mission simulation. I was part of a small, isolated team of four with limited choice of food, preparation and cooking options.

I wanted to know how these conditions would affect the food waste we generated. This research is particularly pertinent now, as COVID-19 forces people into social isolation and raises the (real or imagined) risk of food scarcity.

The Mars Society’s MDRS – Mars Desert Research Station, the world’s largest and longest-running Mars analog program, welcomed a special Mars Academy USA (MAU) crew to its campus last week to begin an historic dual habitat simulation lasting two weeks.

During this mission, one crew is operating at MDRS, while a second crew works out of the MAU habitat, which consists of a series of interlocking geometric tents that house crew quarters and a research area. The crew is made up of medical professionals who are testing how two teams on the same planet would collaborate on emergency medical procedures.

Located in southern Utah, MDRS serves as a home base for crews participating in Mars surface simulation testing and training. Depending on the individual crew’s specialization, its scientific focus ranges from geology to engineering, communications to human factors, robotics to microbiology. A wide variety of scientific and engineering research and educational outreach are typically conducted by crews at MDRS.

IKEA has redesigned the tiny living pod on the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah, filling its interior with space-saving furnishings.

The Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS) is a simulation site that’s designed to emulate the physical and psychological conditions of Mars, where groups of up to six scientists can visit to carry out investigations into the red planet.

Situated in southern Utah, the station comprises seven elements: a greenhouse, solar observatory, engineering pod, science building, robotics observatory, and a domed, two-floor living habitat nicknamed The Hab.

It measures just eight metres in diameter and is where scientists stay during their periods of research, which can last anything from one week to three months.

CU students in the “Medicine in Space and Surface Environments” class perform CPR on a “fallen” crewmate in the Habitat at the Mars Desert Research Station in southern Utah.

Ben Easter, MD, steps onto a rocky ledge overlooking a dry riverbed. He cranes his neck and points into the canyon.

“Right here,” the emergency medicine doctor says with a gleeful glint, belying his boyish looks, “we’re going to foment some chaos and see what happens.”

The simulation is designed to test whether students, thrust into a search-and-rescue scenario where they must navigate rugged topography and rapid-fire events, are able to organize into teams and solve cascading problems, all the while racing the clock to save injured and ill crewmates.

“We want them to walk up onto this ridge and not know where exactly the patient is, and have a kind of ‘oh crap’ moment,” says Easter, on the teaching staff of a new class that blends wilderness medicine and aerospace engineering.

In a remote part of southern Utah – at the Mars Desert Research Station to be precise – 21 University of Colorado Boulder aerospace engineering students, a mix of graduate students and undergrads, became Martians. They experienced seven days of gut-knotting, brain-twisting moments along with after-burner bursts of inspiration – nudging more than a few students into changed-life territory.

Zoe Townsend will join six other members of the LATAM-III crew to experience what life might be like on a future manned mission to Mars. Each of the team members will have specific tasks and challenges to carry out while at the MDRS, ranging from engineering and astrophysics to space farming and group problem-solving. As crew journalist, one of Zoe’s responsibilities will be to document mission progress via video updates. She will also be providing an inside track on her experience for The Student Engineer via a series of blogs, alongside conducting research into mining Martian resources with the aid of a rover.

“My project is a collaboration with the University West of England, where I would be taking a rover with a modular drill station to theoretically investigate the ability to mine resources for a base,” said Zoe. “This is with support from individuals at Catapult, Satellite applications. Another part of my work will be in outreach and creating video diaries for the Steminist platform.

“During my daily life, I am a CERN Engineer where I am working on the integration between the cryostat and the 16T magnets for the Future Circular Collider. Therefore, we also have support from CERN and as such, they will be promoting the mission.”