NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Antarctic Expedition Prepared Researchers for Mars Project

Four of the expedition members scout out field sites in Antarctica's Beacon Valley, one of the most Mars-like places on Earth. From left: Aaron Zent, of NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.; Chris McKay, also of NASA Ames; Peter Smith, of the University of Arizona, Tucson; and Doug Ming, of NASA Johnson Space Center, Houston. Image credit: NASA
› Larger view About half a year before the robotic arm on NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander began digging into soil and subsurface ice of an arctic plain of Mars, six scientists traveled to one of the coldest, driest places on Earth for soil-and-ice studies that would end up aiding analysis of the Mars data.

They used duplicates of some of the Phoenix spacecraft's instruments, plus other methods, in the Antarctic Dry Valleys where breaks in the south polar ice sheet leave windswept rocky terrain exposed. Their two-week expedition, overlapping New Year's Day 2008, was part of the International Polar Year, a multipronged scientific program focused on the Arctic and Antarctic from March 2007 to March 2009.

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