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No spot on Earth is a perfect match for Mars, but by training at some of Earth’s extreme habitats, space agencies including NASA and ESA are fine-tuning techniques for a trip to the Red Planet. �鶹��ý gathered postcards from four of them

Mountain Mars

Within the dome, the team experimented to find out which crops might grow best inside a Martian hut under LED lights and with limited water. They ate the results of these hydroponic experiments – – and also ate fermented foods they made themselves, including yogurt and cheese.

The crew celebrated Earth holidays and had a non-denominational winter celebration. Sheyna Gifford (pictured above), the mission’s chief medical officer, wonders if Christmas will make sense on another planet. “When are they going to do that on Mars given that the calendars don’t match?” She suspects Martian settlers will probably invent new holidays such as “Landing Day”, the date of the first human touchdown on the Red Planet. By the time a colonising spaceship arrives there, the crew will already have developed their own unique culture, Gifford reckons.

White Mars

The average temperature on the Martian surface is about -55 °C, so prolonged exposure to bitter cold will be one of the main challenges of living on  the Red Planet. Last year, a crew of 13 overwintered at Concordia station (pictured) in Antarctica – in part to test the .

All wore activity watches which detect when another person wearing a watch comes close, to explore how their interactions changed over time. Crew member Beth Healey of the European Space Agency, a medical doctor, saw that the group divided into sub-groups based on when they were awake during the extended polar darkness, which lasted over 100 days. Some people tended to have chaotic sleep-wake cycles, while others clung to a traditional 9-to-5 work schedule using cycles of artificial light. “You could really only be friends with people who were up at the same time,” says Healey. Enforcing common mealtimes helped the different groups communicate.

Healey also examined her colleagues’ video diaries to see if the way they talked about their lives changed throughout the mission, and looked at brain scans taken before and after their stay. Findings from this research are yet to be published, but brainwave recordings of crews on a past mission showed that their brains were surprisingly resilient to the prolonged dark and isolation.

Though the winter was brutal, Healey noted in her blog that . “It was strange to see how quickly money can become meaningless,” she wrote, because the base does not use currency. Instead, improvised gifts from crew members became strangely valuable. “A tinfoil penguin and a lampshade made from can ring pulls and stones were among my favourites.”

Desert Mars

In a remote corner of Utah, the Mars Desert Research Station has other Red Planet analogues beaten for sheer barren glamour. “It’s a half-hour drive from the town of Hanksville, and Hanksville has the motto, ‘Where the hell is Hanksville?’” says at the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa, who recently did a stint as a crew biologist at the station.

The facility is owned and run by the , and houses “Utahnauts” in a cylinder-shaped habitat designed to look like something dropped off by a rocket. Whenever they head out through the small airlock, they wear orange jumpsuits and bubble helmets that have a nasty habit of fogging up.

Enough rain falls there to let some small shrubs, fungus and soil microbes grow. Sokoloff’s project was to survey this “Martian” flora. Astronauts won’t be picking sagebrush or mushrooms on Mars, but the soil-dwelling bacteria Sokoloff collected could reflect the survival strategies of Martian microbes, if they exist. The methods used to carefully isolate those extreme life forms from the soil are much like what future Mars botanists must resort to. Some microbes change the structure of the rocks and soils that host them: if similar structural shifts turn up on Mars, it could signify life.

Wet Mars

Mars’s surface gravity is only two-fifths that of Earth’s, and Mars has no breathable air – so what better place to mimic its suffocating floatiness than under the sea on Earth?  This is the premise of the Aquarius Reef Base, a small habitat 19 metres down off the coast of Key Largo, Florida. In July last year, six aquanauts spent 16 days living down there – the 21st instalment of the .

The crew tested equipment inside the habitat, and carried out simulated spacewalks on the seabed. The lessons learned there could be invaluable for future, low-gravity missions, to Mars and beyond.