Six hours from Salt Lake City is Hanksville, Utah, a tiny town of 200 in the middle of nowhere. Keep driving away from civilization and you’ll come across a small, white landing pod nestled among the mesas and canyons of the San Rafael Desert. It’s the Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS), a simulation of Mars right here on Earth.
MDRS is the second of four planned Mars simulation habitats maintained by the Mars Society, an international non-profit organization advocating human exploration of Mars. It was built in 2000, shortly after the Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station. Since then, crews of six have come December through April, rotating every two weeks. The station is a luxurious 24 feet wide, and looks something like an oversized tin can perched atop a set of legs. The station (called the “hab”), along with the greenhouse and observatory, is both home and laboratory for the crew.
Crew members come from around the world to participate in MDRS. Past crew members have been engineers, astronomers, biologists, journalists, and a variety of others, hailing from countless organizations and research universities — from NASA scientists to inexperienced students like myself.
The desert in Utah is one of the closest analog environments to Mars on Earth, making it the perfect place to learn what living and researching on another planet might be like. From here? On to Mars!
