Star trek: Antarctica
The icy continent is a perfect place to imitate space
As Rob Ferl and Anna-Lisa Paul navigated their way from the plane to their quarters at the Alfred Wegener Institute's Neumayer Station research base in Antarctica last January, they couldn’t help but imagine they were on Star Trek.
"It’s more like the Starship Enterprise than a building," Rob Ferl says. “In fact, we called the lounge at the front of the facility Ten Forward, after the crew lounge on the Enterprise.”
Space references in Antarctica are fitting because the continent is the closest thing to space on Earth, a perfect place for University of Florida horticultural scientists, and lead principal investigators for the Space Plant Lab, Ferl and Paul to test whether the agricultural systems they have been developing for space travel work.
"It is a hostile environment that can kill you if you walk out the door unprepared," says Anna-Lisa Paul. “You quickly realize that you can't run down the road to Home Depot when you need something. You have to learn in situ resource utilization.”
As you get closer, they lower the temperature in the plane and you put on your overalls so you don't walk out of the plane and die instantly," Ferl jokes. In reality, he says, the temperature during the Antarctic summer was usually in the 20s and that the bigger threat was sunburn and snow blindness.
"Every morning, we leave the Starship Enterprise and walk out to the Future Exploration Greenhouse," Ferl says. “It's a small demonstration in a containerized unit in a very extreme environment here on Earth to give us some real operational clues as to how to do that on the moon or on Mars.”
"For me personally, one of the most impressive things about the trip was the vast horizons," Rob Ferl says. "To paraphrase Mark Watney, the protagonist of The Martian: 'Every day, I go outside and look at the vast horizons. Just because I can.' That is what we did, every day, to try to appreciate the place.”