Haughton Crater, on Devon Island, only a few hundred miles from the North Pole, is littered with shards of rock and the occasional fossil tree limb.
Temperatures can be bitterly cold, even in midsummer.
It is one of the most alien and unfriendly environments on Earth. That makes it an ideal place to set up a prototype Martian living space and laboratory, says Robert Zubrin, the former Lockheed Martin senior engineer who heads the project. A NASA team is already in Haughton Crater, testing drilling equipment, pilotless helicopters and other machinery that might one day be operated by astronauts on the surface of Mars. For Zubrin, the project is a stepping stone toward a private unmanned mission to Mars. All of the research is part of a larger effort to persuade NASA that a human mission to Mars is feasible within the next decade.