Nasa

For nasa,the sixties had ended in triumph. Human had walked on the moon and nasa had put them there. For the space agency, the success of the first lunar landing was an invitation to dream even bigger dreams.Nasa admistrador Tom Painne and hios deputies planned a stunning array of space activities so extensive that they would live up to the vision presented.GOLDEN, Colo -- Explorers eager to trek across the Moon's battered surface or Mars' dusty plains may be stranded here on Earth but our planet offers an array of locations that, in varying degrees, mimic those otherworldly landscapes.

Scientists and engineers view these lookalike places as training grounds for future expeditions. They are called analog sites.

By networking analog sites, early shakeout of equipment -- from space suits and land rovers to drills and robotic devices -- becomes viable and can be rated ready for flight. Habitat construction ideas and science-gathering tasks and procedures could be practiced. Even appraising the team spirit of individuals laboring in dangerous and remote environments is feasible.

That's the counsel of William Muehlberger of the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of Texas in Austin. He was principal investigator for geology for the Apollo 16 and 17 missions to the Moon, and has continued as an instructor and advisor to the astronauts on Earth observations from Skylab, Apollo-Soyuz, Space Shuttle, and the International Space Station.

"Once a crew had been assigned to a landing site, training became specific to that site," said Muehlberger said. "Field trips were operated as if the crew was on the Moon and Mission Control was in Houston. They became progressively more complex and as close to the actual traverses they would be doing on the Moon as was possible," he recounted.

In fact, those on the last three Apollo landings had enough exposure to rock hounding to be comparable to a typical Master's Degree candidate in geology.

"Even so, they were shy about naming lunar rocks as they collected them for fear that they would give them a wrong name and embarrass themselves to the world," Muehlberger said. That changed on the last lunar mission, given the expertise of Apollo 17's Jack Schmitt, a highly qualified geologist/astronaut.

Looking toward tomorrow's off-world geologists, Muehlberger offered sage advice. For astronauts heading back to the Moon or those that plant their boots on Mars, they won't have to go through all the basic geology training as geologists are now part of the astronaut corps, he said.

"However, they'll still have to learn the basic camera steps to document the scene, to document where the sample came from, and to describe the features of interest to the world," Muehlberger noted.

Land of perpetual peril

Several Mars exploration analog sites are already up and running.

Teams of researchers make use the NASA Haughton-Mars Project planted on Devon Island, in the Canadian high Arctic. Also operating there is the Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station, run under the auspices of the Mars Society. Similarly, the society operates a Mars Desert Research Station that sits in the American desert, west of Hanksville, Utah.

"We need to determine what modes of exploration are most effective...in the field, in the lab, and in telescience consultation with Earth," said Robert Zubrin, President of the Mars Society. "Then you can develop the technologies that allow those exploration tactics to be implemented," he said.

Mars analog operations research on Earth is critically important, Zubrin said. "It makes no sense to spend hundreds of billions of dollars developing technologies if they are the wrong technologies for doing the job that needs to be done."

The Devon Island and Utah encampments are valuable in their own right. But there are many pages to the big book of space exploration.

In other words -- and particularly for Mars -- that planet is so diverse and complex no single analog site fits the bill.

Fertile testing ground

Antarctica, as example, is one place on the planet where human beings are in perpetual peril. Environmental conditions are severe. Supply lines of food, fuel and equipment linked to that remote continent are critical. It's tough sledding in more ways than one.

For loads of reasons, Antarctica resembles exploration programs that NASA would implement on either the Moon or Mars, suggests Dean Eppler, senior scientist for Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) in Houston, Texas.

Eppler recently spent time on the ice in search of meteorites. He reported that Antarctica is an "extremely fertile testing ground" for keeping humans alive and performing useful work in a cold, hostile environment like Mars.

"In order to understand how to initiate and support long-term, sustained activities on planetary bodies off the Earth, the experience gleaned by the United States Antarctic Program since its inception in the 1950s will be very important for NASA to understand," Eppler said.

Lessons learned from Antarctica and other analog sites need to be gathered, "so we can understand what we're not doing and what needs to be done," Eppler told SPACE.com.

"Antarctica is a good source