Picture: Drone view of the Haughton-Mars Venture Base Camp positioned on Devon Island within the Excessive Arctic. Credit score: HMP/Pascal Lee.
The Nationwide House Society not too long ago awarded a $15,000 grant to the Haughton-Mars Venture (HMP) in assist of their 2024 Apollo Fellowship and STEM (Science, Expertise, Engineering and Arithmetic) training actions. The NSS grant funds are derived from a 2019 grant to NSS from the Membership For the Future.
The Haughton-Mars Venture is a NASA and personal sector-supported, U.S.-based worldwide planetary analog area analysis challenge sited on Devon Island within the Excessive Arctic. It’s devoted to advancing the long run scientific exploration of the Moon and Mars by robotic techniques and people. Devon Island is the most important uninhabited island and largest single expanse of polar desert on our planet. The terrain just isn’t snowy or icy within the challenge’s summer season season, however reasonably a large, largely lifeless expanse of pink rock, bodily mimicking the floor of Mars.
“The Haughton-Mars Venture is a world chief in planetary analog area science and exploration, and I’m glad that the NSS is ready to contribute to, and companion in, the challenge’s Apollo Fellowship and different STEM training actions,” stated Dale Skran, COO of the Nationwide House Society. “Nicely-designed Mars analog area work helps each the exploration and eventual human settlement of Mars.”
Established in 1997, the HMP is led by Dr Pascal Lee, planetary scientist on the SETI Institute, Mars Institute, and NASA Ames Analysis Middle, and professor of planetary sciences at Kepler House College. Dr Lee can also be a recipient of the NSS’s 2023 House Pioneer Award for Mars Science and Engineering and is at the moment serving as a member of the Nationwide Academies’ Steering Committee on a Science Technique for the Human Exploration of Mars.
The HMP-2024 Apollo Fellowship was awarded to Nicolas Mahoume, a grasp’s graduate pupil in aerospace engineering on the Technical College of Delft within the Netherlands. Mahoume and his educational advisor, Prof. Sebastiaan de Vet, are working with Lee to grasp the character and scale of geologic terrain options on Mars that will profit probably the most from aerial exploration by robotic rotorcraft. The sphere analysis was performed with personalized drones.
“I’m grateful to the Nationwide House Society for its beneficiant assist of the Haughton-Mars Venture, our Apollo Fellowship program, and our different STEM training endeavors,” stated Lee. “The success of humanity’s future on the Moon and Mars is determined by coaching extremely certified explorers who could have acquired the wanted expertise in surviving, performing, and thriving in excessive environments, doing scientific fieldwork and advancing exploration.”
Different HMP-2024 STEM actions enabled by the NSS award embody dwell interactions from the sphere with distant college students throughout the U.S. and the anticipated presentation of the HMP-2024 Apollo Fellowship analysis outcomes and STEM actions on the NSS’ Worldwide House Improvement Convention (ISDC) in Orlando, Florida on June 19-22, 2025.
For extra info on the Haughton-Mars Venture and its Apollo Fellowship Program, go to their web site or their NASA web site.
