Mars in an Ice Cave

Last year’s Mars 500 simulation – in which six men locked themselves inside of a spacecraft-like environment in the outskirts of Moscow for 520 days – may have been scientifically “accurate” but looked more like a boring space nerd episode of Big Brother. The latest Mars simulation, however, was hosted deep in some Austrian ice caverns and involved a robot parade, the construction of a restaurant, the first-ever space simulation #tweetup, and of course lots of tests on whether humans could actually occupy the Red Planet.

The Dachstein Mars simulation, which ran from April 27 to May 1, was organized by the non-profit Austrian Space Forum, with the support of researchers and institutions from eleven countries. I emailed Gernot Groemer, Dachstein’s project director, to talk about everything from Mars tweetups to the future of big science and why subterranean caverns are the best place in the world for a crowd of space obsessives to prototype what life on the red planet would actually be like.

Dachstein isn't the first Analog Mars Simulation in the world, but it is the first to happen at the subsurface level, and in giant ice caverns no less. What exactly were you attempting to accomplish, and why in subterranean caves in Austria?

Caves on Mars are some of the astrobiological hotspots on the Red Planet: They provide an excellent radiation shelter, allow a higher humidity and have a much more stable temperature regime than the surface. However, working in a 3D terrain where you don’t have high resolution maps is very different than on the surface. In general, we wanted to get a first impression of the challenges such an operation would bring with regards to communication, terrain, situational awareness for the flight controllers, and many more factors.

Walk me through a typical day of simulation. What happens in a Mars simulation campaign? What equipment was involved, and who exactly participated? Is everybody in the cave strapped into space gear?

Well, the preparation started more than six months before with the announcement of an opportunity for international researchers, the crew selection and training, as well as establishing the infrastructure to work with the suit in the caves, including modifications to Aouda.X itself. We work along a very detailed flight plan, a matrix telling us who does what where and when. We are all “slaves of the flight plan” – it is the only feasible way to manage all the different requests from science whilst maintaining an eye on limited resources like power, bandwidth, suit tester exhaustion, et cetera.

So the typical day starts with an early morning briefing, everyone staffs his or her flight controller station, the cave teams get their daily safety briefing and helmets and start the ascent to the caves. After the two-hour long donning of the suit, the magic moment is when the flight director switches on the “green light,” so that everyone is aware that we are in simulation mode and everything is nominal, then we start to work on the experiments.

The equipment involved ranges from basic infrastructure like W-LAN directional high bandwidth transceivers, simple things like working LED floodlights to the suit itself, and the gears and instruments it’s supposed to interact with, such as the rovers, the Cliff Reconnaissance Vehicle or biological contamination experiments. Only the suit tester himself is in the suit, the others are supporting him for safety reasons, e.g. making sure, that the high tech equipment is available and fully functional when it comes to the experiment. One of the most valuable ressources we have is suit tester time, and there’s quite a negotiation process beforehand.

This project involved quite a bit of infrastructure, including a restaurant, a local command center, and a large communications infrastructure inside and outside the cave. Can you speak a little bit more to what was involved in constructing all this and why it was needed?

The local command infrastructure is essential to have a good situational awareness for the science teams – a few years ago we started with two laptops, and now we have at least a dozen people controlling the telemetry of the suit, the flight planning, interfacing to the external science teams, etc. The restaurant fortunately was already there as part of the gondola infrastructure, plus electricity and a high bandwidth connectivity. In other field tests – such as next years Morocco campaign in February 2013 in the Northern Sahara – we’ll have to bring all this with us.

I read about some of the particular challenges of executing an analogue simulation campaign in a cave, namely, you know, fitting gear and suits through narrow passageways. Can you tell me a little bit more about those challenges and how your team overcame them?

Some challenges were foreseen. For example, in addition to the wireless communication infrastructure, we brought hundreds of meters of LAN cables, repeaters, and whatnot. Others were unexpected, such as our AKG headsets — which really worked well! — started to slip whenever then suit tester bent over low with the 45kg suit on. The latter was also a real physical challenge: wearing Aouda.X for several hours is a workload and cognitive challenge, but you never hear them complaining. Our suit testers are our heroes.

You held a #marstweetup where you invited 20 Twitter followers to the simulation site. What was that all about? Is space no longer safe from the snares of social networking?

Indeed, this was the first-ever space tweetup in Austria, the tweeps were chosen by their follower numbers and their affinity for space activities. In fact, we had to cut the number of applicants down to a reasonable number. Twitter is, in our view, the best platform suitable for an activity like the Dachstein simulation. Some tweeps came from Greece, the Netherlands, the UK. These people really fascinated me: they organized everything themselves, followed our researchers like groupies, and spread the word in real time across the net. They were a great complement to the classical journalists and I hope we can have many more space tweetups in the future.

The US just cut funding for the space shuttle program last year, and we’re in the midst of a time when a lot of the country’s big science projects like the Tevatron are getting funding cut as well. How did OWF get funding for this project, and what is the landscape like in Europe at the moment as far as getting big science projects such as this funded?

In general, the science funding landscape is no better off than the US, but we were lucky to get in touch with great industrial partners — they provided a lot of in-kind contributions, because they either had technologies to test (such as a software company called Catalysts), or simply were enthusiastic to be able to contribute. We have some research funding coming from the Austrian Space Forum, but most importantly, we heavily rely on volunteer work.

This goes clearly beyond the typical “I-like-Space”-fan, but we had the luck to attract a lot of team members who are real specialists in what they do in their normal life, like cutting-edge programmers, outreach buffs or even European Space Agency staff members who used part of their vacation to join the Dachstein mission. One thing I was told was that they were able to experience what is sometimes hard to find in an agency job: the enthusiasm, the flexibility, and ability to improvise and – in the end – be part of an idea which ultimately might pave the way to explore a new world.

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