Is this MARS? No, it’s UTAH Boeing and NASA employees partner with academia to practice what it might be like to live on the Red Planet By Alex Wilson Frontiers July 2014 31 Alejandro Diaz surveyed the red desert through his clear, spherical helmet. Beside him, an orange space suit—its legs and arms filled with sandbags to form the shape of a human—lay on a wheeled stretcher. A taut rope tied around the front axle extended up a hill about 100 feet (30 meters) to a member of Diaz’s team, who wore a similar suit and a white backpack that pumped fresh air into it. Diaz lifted a foot from the dusty red soil and started his ascent. Along with another space-suited member of the team, the three worked to pull the stretcher up the steep mound of sandstone and iron oxide, which gives the soil its red pigment. It was a test: how best to transport an injured astronaut across the rugged terrain of Mars. Only this wasn’t the Red Planet but a remote part of southwest Utah, an hour’s drive from the closest town, population 217, and a 10-hour drive from Diaz’s job as a Boeing engineer with Advanced Space Exploration in Huntington Beach, Calif. “Now granted, we can’t simulate PHOTO: Boeing’s Kavya Manyapu, crew engineer, scouts locations for simulated rescue operations at the Mars Desert Research Station. MARS DESERT RESEARCH STATION
Frontiers July 2014 Issue
To see the actual publication please follow the link above