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 Objectives & Research Abstracts
Expedition Three (Crew 57) will be the Mars Society Canada's (MSC) and the Mars Expedition Research Council's (MERC) third research-class mission of the Expedition Mars Analogue Research Series (ExMARS) program. On Expedition Three (ExThree), two research projects will be carried out involving regolith-landform mapping and a local microbial survey. Both of these projects were initiated during Expedition One in 2003 and have been ongoing since their inception. In addition to the two projects, ExThree will continue additional works executed on previous ExMARS missions (ExOne and ExTwo) and MDRS missions in the areas of geology, biology, extravehicular activity traverse planning, and wireless positioning.
Concurrently with the ExMARS missions, MSC has completed three Expedition Mars Research Training Series (ExMATS) missions including Expeditions Alpha, Beta, and Gamma to MDRS. ExMATS was developed to train new recruits for the ExMARS missions, and ExThree will be the first ExMARS mission to trial the principle behind the ExMATS program. Furthermore, ExThree will work to continue the momentum that is necessary to keep the ExMARS program thriving in its ongoing efforts to help prepare for sending humans to Mars.
Microbial Survey of the Area Around the Mars Desert Research Station
Olathe J. Clark
A survey of microbial abundance and diversity in soil and water samples in the area around the Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS) will be performed. An analysis of the relationship between environmental factors and microbial abundance and diversity will be made. The spread plate method for colony forming units (CFUs) and Biolog EcoPlates™ (Biolog Inc., CA) will be used to culture samples. Results will be mapped with terrain and environmental factors and made available to future crews. Crew effort will be recorded for sampling and lab work.
Regolith Landform Mapping
Melissa Battler and Jonathan Clarke
Regolith-Landform mapping is an approach to identifying planetary surface materials through correlating them with landforms. The techniques of regolith-landscape mapping have been developed in Australia in recent years, and have proved an important part of any field study on earth of surface materials, landscape, biota, and hydrology.
Regolith can be defined as the unconsolidated material covering the surface of a planet; everything between fresh rock and fresh air, including transported material, weathered rocks, duricrust, or fresh bedrock. A landform is any physical, recognizable aspect or feature of the Earth's surface. It is known that landforms and regolith are formed by essentially the same groups of processes, and once the inter-relationships between regolith and landforms are understood, landforms can then be used to predict regolith patterns – on the Earth, Mars, or other planets. Thus landforms can used as a proxy for the regolith when ground truth is not available. In addition, knowledge of regolith (or soil) type on or around a certain landform or terrain can add enormous value to field microbiology, through providing a context to the site description.
The goal of this project is to add on to the work carried out by Jonathan Clarke during Expedition One (Feb/Mar 2003), and produce a detailed 1:1000 scale map of the immediate MDRS area. In order to carry out this project, we will rely heavily on the guidance and direction of the Remote Science Team, and we will scout and document our sites using Sklar's Field Documentation Methodology.
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