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CNN Sunday Morning
Scientists Simulate a Workday on Mars on a Remote Canadian Island
Aired July 29, 2001 - 08:43 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
KYRA PHILLIPS, CNN ANCHOR: All right, well, now we're going to take a look at the fourth rock from the sun, and that is Mars, or at least as close as we can get here on Earth, right?
VINCE CELLINI, CNN ANCHOR: That's right. CNN's Miles O'Brien takes us inside the Arctic Circle for a look at what conditions might be like on the Red Planet.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
MILES O'BRIEN, CNN SPACE CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): It could be a scene from a B-grade science fiction thriller.
But this is the real thing, well, sort of. "Journey To The Red Planet," meet Capricorn I. It is an ersatz expedition to a make- believe Mars with a serious goal in mind.
BOB ZUBRIN, MARS SOCIETY: This is a war game, except it's not about war. It's about learning how to explore on Mars.
O'BRIEN: Bob Zubrin is a rocket scientist too restless to remain lab-bound. He is leader of the burgeoning Mars Society, a group trying to spark interest in colonizing the red planet.
He and five others are living the life of would-be Martian explorers, complete with tight quarters, limited supplies, delayed communication home and space-suited sojourns outsides the ship.
ZUBRIN: By doing it this way, by doing it the hard way, we're beginning to show what human's might be able to accomplish on Mars.
O'BRIEN: Their simulated space ship sits at the edge of a crater on the largest uninhabited island on Earth, Devon Island in the Canadian high Arctic. It is a very cold, very dry, seemingly lifeless place.
ZUBRIN: There are no trees. There is no grass. There are no bushes. There are almost no birds. There are almost no insects. And when you do see some life, as I -- today, I saw a flower. And it was like meeting a friend in a strange place. And it was a very interesting experience.
O'BRIEN: You might call this the ultimate space camp, and in a sense it is. But there is more to this place than cosmic role- playing. The real star of the show here is the science.
PASCAL LEE, PLANETARY SCIENTIST Rocks are like books, they hold a story, they tell a story, and each rock here is a book to be read. It will tell you something about life on Earth. It will tell you something about the possibilities of life elsewhere.
O'BRIEN: Pascal Lee is a planetary scientist with NASA and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute. He leads the other dimension of the Devon expedition, the NASA led research effort.
LEE: When we first came here in 1997, we were just astounded by the sites we saw. It wasn't just the crater itself, but all the valleys and the canyons around this place, that bore similarity with Mars. We just thought this is Mars on Earth.
O'BRIEN: And so, ever since, some of the world's leading space engineers and scientists have summered here in a frigid tent city to test their latest theories on how to explore Mars.
ZUBRIN: The navigator is really operating well.
O'BRIEN: It's interesting how reminiscent these are to some MGS images I've seen.
LEE: Yeah, oh yeah. Welcome.
O'BRIEN: Welcome to Devon in all its stunning desolation. From the air, Pascal Lee showed me a virtual Mars-scape, the size of West Virginia.
The valleys you see below here were formed thousands of years ago when the ice sheets were melting. They resemble very closely a network of valleys that scientists have observed for years on the planet Mars. What they know about what happened here may change the way they think about what happened on Mars.
For example, Lee believes Mars may not have been warm and wet millions of years ago, the current conventional wisdom. Instead, based on his work here, he suggests the Martian atmosphere was cold and the planet itself was warm enough to melt surface ice. Just one more small piece in a very big puzzle.
LEE: Mars is not a name in itself. It's one of the places, in fact, the most tantalizing place in the solar system where we might find a chance to find some answers to some age old questions. Are we alone in the universe? Is life as we know it on the Earth unique? How might other forms of life view life? Where might we find other forms of life and what types of forms might they take? This is something that exploration on Mars could help us on. At least, we hope. And it's something that we are able to plan for better by coming to a place like this.
O'BRIEN: That is what drew Katy Quinn to this place. An MIT grad student and astronaut want-to-be, she logged a tough tour of duty in the simulated space suit. KATY QUINN, MIT GRADUATE STUDENT: We tried to make the space suits had to move in, restricted visibility in the helmets, gloves to make things hard to pick up. And, you know, I think the value of having people here doing things in these environments and these conditions with these restrictions, you learn so much more.
O'BRIEN: On their Mars walks, they found lots of rocks like these. Seemingly innocuous, and yet when turned over, smoking gun proof of ancient life. The kind of discovery that beckons on marks.
ZUBRIN: It would take decades to develop robots that would be able to go to Mars to find this. We found it in two hours. So, what we're showing here is that if we want to explore Mars, we've got to send people.
O'BRIEN: But there are no plans to do that just yet. Just dreams, experiments, simulations and the hope it will all lead to a distant yet maybe familiar place.
Miles O'Brien, CNN, on Devon Island.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
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