In high Arctic, Bill Clancey prepares to explore Mars

By Marion Softky

Almanac Staff Writer

For Bill Clancey, colonizing Mars is more than just a fantasy. His job focuses on exploring the red planet; settling there is his dream.

In fact, the Portola Valley scientist has just returned from two weeks near the North Pole. He and a team of scientists lived in a simulated Mars work station while they conducted studies of a meteorite crater that is as close to a Mars environment as you can find on earth.

The Flashline Mars Research Station (FMARS) is a simulated Mars base, two stories high and 24 feet in diameter, located on Devon Island 500 miles north of the Arctic Circle in the Canadian Arctic. Here a team of six scientists can live while they study the geology and biology in the 15-mile diameter Haughton impact crater.

"It is built of a size you could send to Mars today," says Dr. Clancey hopefully. "You could live there for 500 days."

Dr. Clancey, who is chief scientist for human-centered computing at NASA/Ames Research Center, was in Nunavut to study the human factors that affect teams working in extreme environments, far from help, rescue, or Mission Control. 

Dr. Clancey will present results from this summer's field season at the international convention of the Mars Society this weekend at Stanford. He will moderate a panel at 3 p.m. Friday, August 24, in Dinkelspiel Auditorium.

Television viewers will be able to get a more direct, if less scientific, view of the run-up to human exploration of Mars when the Discovery Channel airs a documentary filmed at FMARS. The three-part series, "Mars on Earth: Mars pioneers build a colony in the Arctic," is scheduled to run this fall.

The Discovery film crew caught at least one unrehearsed and embarrassing incident. A vehicle, dragging a trailer loaded with heavy geologic equipment, got stuck in the mud of the crater.

Dr. Clancey and his teammates learned all sorts of lessons about the challenges of working on Mars from this _ and every _ incident during the summer season.

"On Mars, it wouldn't have been mud, it might have been sand. On Mars we probably would have lost the equipment," he says. 
Passion for Mars

Dr. Clancey is one of the lucky ones who can merge his work with his passion for Mars.

His work involves helping NASA design systems that allow people to interact effectively with high technology in space-age facilities. "We put people first, rather than technology," he says in an interview in his wooded Portola Valley home, where he lives with his wife, Danielle Fafchamps, a manager with Hewlett-Packard.

One of his current projects is helping the Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) in Pasadena prepare for two Mars rovers to roam the barren planet in 2003. Each rover will be guided by a team based at JPL; each team will communicate with a different Mars time zone.

Since the day on Mars is 40 minutes longer than the day on Earth, this project involves issues of how people live, work, and get along with their families. "The teams at JPL will have to live in Mars time zones," Dr. Clancey explains. "They report for work 40 minutes later each day."

Dr. Clancey developed his passion for space as a kid when the first Russian went into orbit. Growing up, he avidly followed every mission into space. "I digested it like a sponge," he says.

After earning his Ph.D. in computer science and artificial intelligence at Stanford, Dr. Clancey worked for 10 years with the Institute for Research on Learning in Menlo Park, where he learned about the human factors that affect the way that people relate to computers and technology.

About the time he moved to NASA in 1998, Dr. Clancey was browsing in Kepler's bookstore in Menlo Park and picked up "The Case for Mars," by Robert Zubrin, president of the Mars Society. He was hooked. 

The Mars Society's goal is to promote the exploration and settlement of Mars. It works with NASA, but extends its goals into the far future.

"The number one reason the Mars Society exists is to inform and excite the public about going to Mars," says Dr. Clancy. "We need to get people into the state of mind that got us to the moon in 10 years."
500 days _ and beyond?

Dr. Clancey seems undaunted by massive challenges.

To put people on Mars for 500 days requires engineering and equipping a base that can support workers for a year-and-a half. The team would actually be away from earth for three years, including six-to-nine months transit time each way.

"Rockets are not the hard thing," says Dr. Clancey. "The hard thing is to make sure people are still functioning after six-to-nine months of weightlessness. The most exciting moment (stepping out on Mars) will happen when they are weakest."

"The Hab" _ as Mars Society members affectionately call the Arctic research station _ is only a partial analog to a real Mars base. It is not pressurized, nor are the space suits the workers normally wear outside. They are also days, not months or years, away from rescue.

Nevertheless, the research teams have learned a lot about the challenges of working on Mars. "You're faced with enough reality to keep you on your toes, and to learn from every incident what it would be like if we were on Mars," says Dr. Clancey. 

His job was to learn how groups of people work together and collaborate. He took time-lapse photos of the crew every three minutes to observe what they did.

"We try to understand what's reality for the crew," he says. "After you leave Earth, there will be no more conversations between the crew and Earth because of the time delay."

Why go to Mars? Dr. Clancey has three answers. First, to learn more about life. Did it evolve independently on Earth and Mars; or did it start on Mars and spread by meteorite to Earth? "If we're descended from life on Mars, that's interesting," he says.

Some want to go to Mars to find new frontiers, or to seek a place where humans can escape their overcrowded, polluted planet.

Dr. Clancey prefers the argument for beauty. "We go to Mars for the same reason we go to the Southwest desert," he says. "It's very beautiful and varied. It's got volcanoes and craters and canyons far greater than anything on Earth."

Dr. Clancey doesn't even flinch from the challenges of setting up colonies on Mars where people could live as on Earth - "in shirt sleeves or at least winter coats."

That dream _ called "terraforming" _ would require changing the climate on Mars, which now has frigid temperatures and one percent of the atmosphere on Earth; and the Mars' atmosphere is made up mostly of poisonous carbon dioxide.

The forthcoming Mars conference will present models for polluting Mars to establish a runaway greenhouse effect that would increase the pressure and raise the temperature, while hardy plants can begin to generate oxygen. "We've learned on Earth what to do," he says. "Earth is a great laboratory for climate change."

Also required would be finding the water scientists believe exists below the Martian surface, as well as nuclear fusion for power, and much improved computers. Dr. Clancey puts faith in the advance of time and technology to achieve these goals.

"We learn as we go," he says. "Things that look like magic to us could be trivial to our children's children."

"Does this take 1,000 years or 100,000 ? We've got time."

Mars Society convenes this weekend at Stanford

Hundreds of Mars buffs from around the world will converge on Stanford this weekend for the fourth annual convention of the Mars Society, from Thursday through Sunday, August 23-26.

They will attend sessions ranging from the search for life on Mars, and information on current studies, to visionary topics like creating an atmosphere on Mars so that people could live there without pressurized containers and space suits.

Highlights will include a talk by astronaut Eileen Collins Saturday at 9 a.m. in Dinkelspiel Auditorium, and a Saturday Mars space camp for kids 8-18.

For information, contact the Mars Society, P.O. Box 273, Indian Hills, CO 80454; log onto www.marssociety.org; or go to the registration desk at Dinkelspiel Auditorium.

The Web site for Portola Valley scientist Bill Clancey is at http://billclancey.name.

The Discovery Channel has extensive coverage of the FMARS project on its Web site at www.discovery.com.