WAYNE COUNTY — Among the quiet, isolated red rocks of Wayne County is an ongoing science experiment. A group of Peruvian university students just finished studying the best way to help an injured astronaut on Mars.

"This area of Utah is unique. As you can see, the reddish color of the rocks absolutely gives you a feeling that you're on Mars," said Alex Diaz, Team Peru's mission commander.

"Not many places have this ‘Mars habitat,' so they've picked this place correctly," he said.

Diaz is a NASA finalist in a group of potential future astronauts. His crew, Team Peru, is one of 13 teams competing in the 2013 "Building the Future of Mars" program, at the Mars Desert Research Station.

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According to Urban Dictionary (the finest source of American literature), a Red Shirt is defined as: A character in a science fiction or adventure story whose sole dramatic purpose is to get killed by the story’s villain and/or itinerant monster. Taken from the propensity of security officers on the original Star Trek series (who typically wore red uniform tops) to be killed in the episodes' pre-opening credit teasers. 

When I was young I wanted to be an astronaut but I never had the discipline to follow through. At one point I wanted to be a scientist but I barely made it out of high school and later dropped out of college but not until after I learned a little chemistry for recreational use in my younger days.

Even with my Red Shirts I have always been wanted to be around people that put their minds and bodies to the test. I even married a woman that has three Master’s degrees and is working on her Ph. D. I have always prided myself in consuming as much science news as possible. To me, the mind and the search for tangible knowledge is the fuel for dreams and will lead you to adventures in life.

So with that said, when I heard about the Mars Desert Research Station in the desert of southern Utah I knew I had to go. I had tried for years to go but my story pitches never made the cut, maybe I wasn’t an experienced enough photojournalist at the time for an agency to trust me with an assignment that took quite an investment to tackle. At times I had thought this place was going to be my Red Shirt assignment.

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[Image: Reuters/Jim Urquhart]

A class of Flat Bush children made contact with Kiwis on "Mars".

The crew performed science, research and exploration tasks while also talking to schools back here on "earth".

Teacher David Wilcock says the chance to Skype the TasMars mission crew filled the children with enthusiasm for the topic and a passion for their learning.

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[Image: Rose Cawley]

When Jane first met John, she knew that they would spend the rest of their lives together — literally. The pair spent more than eight years in space flight training before leaving Earth without the possibility of return.

As members of the first Mars colony, Jane and John naturally gravitated towards each other because they share the same future of an isolated life on a new planet. And as their mental bond grew, so did a fervent, passionate physical urge for each other. Now they face an obstacle for which they never trained: sex on the Red Planet.

Jane and John are fictional characters. But if a handful of Mars colonization projects have their way, their lives could be a reality in just 10 years.

On the surface, this story sounds like the beginning of a wonderful extraterrestrial romance. However, there's a dark side — having sex on Mars is unexplored and could potentially be life-threatening.

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[Image: Mashable.com]

I am on Mars, at least that’s what it looks like here in the high desert of Utah. Six of us are living in the Mars Desert Research Station, a two-story cylindrical habitat 30 feet across with steep ladder stairs between floors.  Our bunks are 4 by 11 feet and we share one bathroom.  Why am I here for Christmas instead of home with my four children?  For science.

We are pioneers, studying how humans could live on another planet. We’re in full sim. We eat rehydrated/dehydrated food, suffer a 20-minute lag time with communications, travel outside the Hab in spacesuits and ride ATVs in the red desert. We each pay for our travel and a flat fee for food and lodging, but what we get back is invaluable. We have forwarded the progress of science, taking humanity one small step closer to striding onto the surface of Mars.

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[Image: Nora Swisher]

With the lights from the Habitat Module glowing faintly behind me, I turned off my head torch, comms device and air-circulation system. Holding my breath, I stopped for a moment on the edge of a vast darkness. As my eyes adjusted, I could begin to see hills in the distance, their edges smudged into unfocused murkiness like a Monet landscape.  But there were no artificial lights over this alien horizon, and I knew that I could walk for days without seeing any traces of human life.  "Welcome to Mars," I thought.

Of course, I had not really travelled millions of miles through space to reach this empty, other-worldly landscape. The Habitat Module behind me was actually part of the Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS), a facility dedicated to developing and testing field tactics and protocols for a human expedition to Mars. Located in a remote area of the Utah desert, the station's paprika-coloured surroundings mimic the landscape of the red planet, lending an air of realism to research on such topics as design features of habitat modules, psychological studies of crew members, assessment of crew-selection procedures and even tests to determine the best kinds of food for Mars explorers.

My journey to this earthly version of Mars began in August 2011, when I applied for an engineering position at MDRS and was selected as part of a crew of six people. My fellow crew members came from several different disciplines and countries. They included a Spanish-born artist and journalist, Alicia Framis; Michael LeClair, a Canadian geologist, programmer and psychologist; Usha Lingappa, an American astrobiologist; another American, Mike Lotto, who like me is an aerospace engineer by training; and our commander Charlotte Poupon, an industrial designer for extreme environments and naval officer from France. Each year, around 10 of these six-person crews stay at the MDRS, typically for two weeks at a time, while a similar number carry out studies at a sister station in the Arctic for several months at a time. Three additional stations are currently under construction in Hawaii, Iceland and Australia, and all five are run by the Mars Society – a group that mainly consists of professional scientists, engineers and academics with an interest in Mars exploration. The stations also receive significant collaboration and funding from NASA's Ames Research Center and the entrepreneur and former physicist Elon Musk.

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[Image: Ashley Dale]