An intrepid team of students from the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology (Skoltech) has swapped Moscow’s snowdrifts and freezing temperatures for a mission to Mars – at least, to the Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS) in the U.S. state of Utah.
Skoltech crew 161 on “Mars”, from left to right: Veronika Shteyngart, Adeniyi Adebayo, Divya Shankar, Mikhail Khmelik and Natalya Glazkova. Photo: Skoltech
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The trip to the harsh desert environment is part of the Mars Society’s Mars Analog Research Station (MARS) project, a U.S.-based volunteer enterprise that aims to carry out research needed to prepare for humans to explore Mars.
The isolated station, which MDRS describes on its website as “a prototype of a habitat that will land humans on Mars and serve as their main base for months of exploration in the harsh Martian environment,” is now home to a team of five students from Skoltech’s space and energy tracks led by team captain Divya Shankar.
“In the grand scheme of things, mankind has to become an interplanetary species to survive in the long run,” said Shankar, a graduate student originally from India.
“So it’s an honor to be at the cutting edge of space studies. The Skoltech space track provides an excellent platform for this. How better to understand Mars than simulating life on it?”
A view from the Mars station. Photo: Skoltech
Crew members are expected to carry out Mars analog field research work and write daily reports for the duration of the mission to the simulated Mars base, which the MDRS says is a “laboratory for learning how to live and work on another planet.”
Joining Shankar on the unusual mission are executive officer/journalist Adeniyi Adebayo, engineer Mikhail Khmelik, astronomer Veronika Shteyngart and biologist Natalya Glazkova, collectively known as Crew 161.
Shankar’s role in the mission is to study the chemical composition of soil samples. “We cannot colonize Mars without a thorough understanding of the chemical composition of its constituent soil,” she said.
The team arrived on January 9 and will stay there until January 24. A sixth student, engineer Mohamed Mahbubur Rahman, was due to join them on Thursday after his journey was delayed by paperwork.
Each of the students spent at least one semester in the U.S. at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which is affiliated with Skoltech, as part of their graduate studies.
The ongoing experiment in Utah, in which some teams stay at the station for months at a time, is also a psychological one, to see how the participants cope with their new environment and isolation.
The race to land a human on the Red Planet heated up late last year when Russian scientists announced that they are currently training monkeys in Moscow to be ready for a Mars mission next year. The news elicited complaints from animal rights activists.