Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Arctic Bound

I'm in downtown Ottawa, sitting in a comfortable hotel room, and contemplating the expedition ahead of me. Tomorrow morning I leave for the High Arctic; I'm headed for Haughton Crater, on Devon Island, by way of Resolute Bay, Nunavut.

Devon Island has the distinction of being the world's largest uninhabited island, but I can tell you this polar desert does indeed have several inhabitants, and I am about to become one. The fact is, this region is extremely desirable as a terrestrial Mars analog, which essentially means that environment, geology, operations, or some combination of factors are similar to a Martian experience.

The Haughton-Mars Project (HMP) is an international field research program, made possible by NASA, SETI, the Mars Institute, and the Canadian Space Agency. The conditions are ideal for real-world testing of rovers, habitats, and space suit prototypes, which is exactly the reason I packed my Arctic survival gear yesterday, and got on a plane to Canada.

However, it's late, and I need to catch a chartered air flight early tomorrow, so I'll have to end this with a ...."to be continued..."

4 Comments:

Blogger Link 11 said...

hello you ,My name is Hiep, I'm from Ha noi , vietnam , I have know your post thought Google Lat Long , I see this post very good , very nice , thanks you so much and " to be continued " !

July 22, 2010 at 1:28 AM  
Blogger Alex Riesen said...

The link to HMP is broken

July 22, 2010 at 3:17 AM  
Blogger Alex Riesen said...

Come to that, all links in the post are.

July 22, 2010 at 3:19 AM  
Blogger Ted said...

Here's a link to the crater location:
http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=75.363118,-89.648437&spn=0.51846,3.062439&t=h&z=9

July 22, 2010 at 9:13 AM  

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