Mission to Mars

摘要

There's nothing terribly remarkable about Building 29 at the Johnson Space Center in Houston until you consider that that's where they will be storing Mars-or at least a pretty good facsimile of it. Spread out inside the sprawling structure will soon he a dead-ringer Mars base, complete with habitat modules, an extraterrestrial greenhouse and even a ground cover of volcanic dust shipped in from Hawaii-about as close as you can get to real Martian dirt without actually visiting the planet. Astronauts training for a Mars mission could spend up to 600 days in this little village, learning to live in an unfamiliar world at least 35 million miles from Earth. This ersatz Mars has been in the works for years', but until now few people have paid much atten-tion to it, largely because nobody realistically ex-pected to set human eyes on the genuine planet anytime soon. As of last week, however, Building 29 could become the center of the universe-or at least the center of NASA'S universe. For the first time in a long time, cosmic planners were given reason to hope-that after decades of drift, the U.S. is at last back in the space game.