Few people have an idea what walking, living and working on Mars may be like, but over spring break, four Penn State students experienced exactly that.

Kevin Sloan (senior-mechanical and electrical engineering), Jason Schwier (senior-computer engineering), Amy Blank (sophomore-mechanical and electrical engineering) and Ryan Kobrick (graduate-aerospace engineering), along with two others, made up crew 25 of the Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS.)

The Research Station, located in southern Utah and sponsored by the International Mars Society, is used as a simulation to explore various facets of potential human exploration to Mars.

All four members of crew 25 from Penn State were a part of the Penn State Mars Society and applied to be a part of a MDRS to test a new rover that they were developing and that could one day be used on manned missions to Mars.

Blank explained that the simulation was fairly accurate although they were not completely familiar with all the equipment.

"The engineering was not really accurate because not all of it could be done in spacesuits, but the fieldwork gave us a good idea of how astronauts would have problems during their experiments and would have to solve them," she said.

Schwier said the crew interactions were also very similar to that of an actual manned mission to Mars.

"The habitation and living in tight quarters helped to make simulation accurate in terms of crew interaction," he said.

Adjusting to working in spacesuits during some of the simulations was the hardest part for part of the team.

"My suit was huge; I had to duct tape my waist so I could walk," Kobrick said.

In addition, the air within the spacesuits heated up quickly, making it tough to breathe, Schwier said.

Blank explained that completing seemingly easy tasks, even walking, had to be done carefully as a result of gloves that made their fingers three times as big and boots that made their feet twice the normal size.

In addition, the spacesuits often contributed to fatigue and dehydration, which became a concern, Kobrick explained.

Going into the simulation, the group's main goal was to carry out rover testing; however, when they arrived at their site, the goals shifted to those of the research station, Sloan said.

From the beginning, the group's trip was marked with change. Due to a last minute crew change, Sloan was promoted to mission commander and was the first college student to hold the position.

"There was lots of pressure, since the crew was almost entirely college students and past crews that included college students sent mission control the stereotypical complaints," he said. "They were described as lazy and messy, but we wanted to change the reputation."

Blank, the Chief Rover Engineer, explained her individual goals involved seeing the rover working in a Mars-like environment, while Schwier wanted just to see if he could survive the simulation and living in the desert for two weeks.

Crew interactions and the ways in which each member lived in the small Habitat with five other people interested Kobrick, who served as the Habitat Engineer and Health Officer for the mission.

All four suggested that living in "The Hab" was actually a step up from dorm rooms and cabin fever was never really an issue. Sloan suggested that this was a distinct advantage in including college students as a part of the simulation crews.

Kobrick said he enjoyed living in The Hab and was eager for a change of pace.

"I liked [living in the Habitat]; it was just like camping," he said. "It was a good change of scenery and nice to get out of the old routine."

A great deal of their simulation involved extra-vehicular activities (EVAs) involving geological or biological experiments that astronauts may carry out someday on the surface of Mars.

The geology experiments involved rock sampling from various locations and mapping these locations so future crews could begin follow-up experiments, Kobrick said. He also explained that soil samples were also taken and tested from carbon dioxide content.

Schwier explained that possibly the biggest experiment was creating experimental procedures. In the past, it was mostly scientists carrying out the fieldwork, but Crew 25 was almost entirely engineers, which meant that they had to be instructed in how to carry out the biological and geological experiments.

While this may have been an inconvenience, Sloan said that refining experimental procedures is a crucial part to a manned Mars mission, since a small crew will be expected to carry out experiments in all scientific disciplines and in many types of engineering.

In addition to carrying out experiments as instructed by the mission support of the MDRS, the four crew members from Penn State spent the last few days working with their rover. Unfortunately, very few of the sanctioned experiments could involve the rover, so the testing was pushed to the final days of the simulation, Schwier said.

Although they didn't get as much time as they had hoped to work on the rover during the simulation, they did accomplish quite a bit, Sloan said. The team was able to get the rover subsystems up and running and even more valuably were able to gain experience of what it will be like for astronauts in the field.

By going through the steps of how a manned mission works, they were able to justify some of their concepts, and have a new direction involving making the rover space-ready, Sloan said.

Blank said those more technical elements of the rover, such as steering control and frame construction, would also be addressed and changed to make it better.

While experimentation consumed much of Crew 25's time, they still found time to interact and develop a close bond, said Schwier.

"Everything went very smoothly, and by the end of the simulation our crew dynamics were very stable. We stuck together and completed everything that needed to be done," he said.

In fact, only one crew member was not a college student. Dennis Creamer, a 70-year-old retired biologist, kept up with the rest of the crew physically and got along with the crew well, showing that age is nothing more than a state of mind, Sloan said.

Sloan explained that the original commander was dismissed because of his unwillingness to work with college students in the simulation, so Creamer was a welcomed addition to the team.

Although the simulation was at sometimes difficult physically and mentally, all four team members said they are already poised to return to the southern Utah desert and further explore the possibility of human exploration of Mars. As an added bonus, Blank, Kobrick and Schwier are all eligible to return to the simulation as Mission Commanders.

Blank recalled one memory of climbing over the immense landscape of the desert as one of her fondest.

"Just staring up then looking down and thinking that I climbed that in a spacesuit; I was proud of [the climb] and that we survived," she said.

Schwier cited that the work ethic and problem solving ability would be what separated Crew 25 from all past and future rotations.

"Out of all the problems we encountered with the Hab and during our EVAs, we complained less than any other crew," he said. "We went out with a bang, working the whole way through and didn't slack off at the end like some crews had done in the past."

Kobrick's fondest memory of the simulation involved the observatory located on site and hoped that any Mars mission would include a telescope.

"Most of the nights, we went up there to just check out the stars in the telescope, you spend all day in an EVA or writing a report, you want to do something a little different," he said.

Sloan explained that his greatest memory of the simulation will be the reputation the crew was able to overcome and how much was accomplished.

"We were going to be the crew that were screw ups and we were able to prove ourselves and have one of the most productive rotations," he said.