Estimated read time: 2-3 minutes
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
PROVO, Utah (AP) -- If man ever steps foot on Mars, they may say it looks like the Utah desert.
Members of the Brigham Young University's Mars Research Group already knows that.
The group has spent the last year working with the Mars Desert Research Station, a simulated Mars base seven miles outside of Hanksville, or 180 miles southeast of Salt Lake City.
Owned by the Mars Society, an international organization devoted to the exploration and settlement of Mars, the station includes a habitat module measuring about 15 to 20 feet in diameter with a laboratory on the first floor and crew quarters on the second level.
Scientists and others from around the world with an interest in the Red Planet, including representatives of NASA, spend two-week rotations at the station conducting experiments and operating as if they were on Mars. Space suits are worn when researchers leave the habitat module.
BYU students help with repairs and improvements at the station and have become involved with research efforts. In a greenhouse next to the habitat module, BYU students are testing the effects of cold and high amounts of carbon dioxide on plants, issues a Mars base would face.
The students are not paid for their efforts.
"We feel that by doing this, the habitat will provide information that will help NASA get to Mars sooner," said Ted Maxwell, a BYU graduate student studying physics.
BYU began working with the station as the closest major university to the site. About 15 BYU students are involved, mostly engineers, physicists, biologists and astronomers.
"I always wanted to be an astronaut," said Peter Brown, a BYU senior studying astronomy. "This gives me an opportunity to go down and play astronaut for a while."
Brown said the landscape at the station looks like Mars.
"Just the whole landscape, you have these bizarre rocks and mountains," he told The Daily Herald of Provo.
This week, BYU students worked to repair a computer that was having problems communicating with a telescope at the desert research station's observatory. Students planned to take the computer back and reinstall it at the site.
David Allred, a BYU professor of physics and astronomy and faculty advisor for the Mars group, said the Mars Research Group formed because of the opportunity to participate in work at the desert research station.
He thinks the students' efforts are helping to put humans on Mars. Issues relating to sending astronauts to the planet are being clarified through their work.
"Everything that ever amounted to anything big always started small," Allred said.
(Copyright 2004 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
