Oct. 2, 2012 As NASA's Curiosity rover scours the surface of
Mars and beams pictures of the stark and desolate landscape back
to Earth, we've begun to paint a picture of what living on the
red planet might actually be like. In this month's Physics World
(http://physicsworld.com/), Ashley Dale, a PhD student at the
University of Bristol, brings this image to life by giving his
account of the two weeks he spent living in the Utah desert as
part of a simulated Mars mission. Comparing his surroundings to
a "Monet landscape," Dale recalls expeditions across the
"paprika-coloured" desert on an all-terrain quad bike and living
out of a Habitat Module - a two-floored, silo-shaped capsule
small enough to fit on top of the main rocket booster of a
launch vehicle. Accompanying Dale on his mission were a
journalist, a geologist, an astrobiologist, an aerospace
engineer and an industrial designer. They all lived out of the
same Habitat Module, which included six compact bedrooms (each
little more than 1 m by 3 m), a commu