An Iranian Girl Is Going To Mars

[Rasputin]

[Rasputin]

Going to Utah to wear spacesuits, eat dehydrated rice pilaf and pretend you're on Mars isn't everyone's idea of spring break. Michele Faragalli and Nasim Kaveh-Moghaddam, engineering students at McGill University, can't wait.

After all, visiting outer space is something they've been mooning about since they were kids staring up at the stars in a pitch-black sky - Faragalli from the steps of his parents' inn in Mont Tremblant, Kaveh-Moghaddam through the lens of her father's telescope on the shores of the Caspian Sea in northern Iran.

Tomorrow, Faragalli, a 25-year-old master's student in robotics at McGill's Centre for Intelligent Machines, and Kaveh-Moghaddam, 24, and in the final semester of her undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering, fly to Salt Lake City, where they will join up with the six other Canadians who will make up Expedition Delta at the Mars Desert Research Station in the barrenlands of southern Utah.

For two weeks, the team of young scientists and engineers will bunk in an ersatz space capsule, trying to simulate what life would be like on the Red Planet.

They also be conducting experiments, studying water samples and analyzing gases in the soil that might resemble those found on Mars.

It will be the fourth land-based mission organized by Mars Society Canada at the Utah site. The space-advocacy group is keen to build support for space exploration through outreach programs and, eventually, larger-scale simulations in other Mars-like environments in the Canadian Arctic, Iceland, Australia and Chile.

For Faragalli and Kaveh-Moghaddam, it's a chance to hone their skills with other astronaut wanna-bes, preparation for a real-life opportunity that may never come.

Though NASA sent robots to Mars four years ago, it's not planning to send a crew until 2030. By then, Faragalli will be 47.

"A lot of it has to do with luck and timing," he said. "You could be born 10 years too early or 10 years too late."

An avid skier who moonlights as a waiter at the family hotel, Faragalli has been in training since he was 12, when he went to space camp in Alabama and met a member of the Apollo 13 crew.

After earning a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering at Memorial University in Newfoundland and Labrador, he collected a master's from the International Space University in Strasbourg, France, then went to Japan for an internship working on planetary rovers.

At McGill, he works on a galloping robot, a remote-controlled device that can hop across rugged terrain at 1.5 metres a second. Though the four-legged apparatus could be used for military purposes or search-and-rescue in disaster zones, Faragalli acknowledges he's always thinking of how it might be used in space. In Utah, he'll be responsible for looking after the all-terrain vehicles.

It was only after her family immigrated 12 years ago that Kaveh-Moghaddam heard about the Canadian Space Agency and began to imagine that she, too, might one day ride in a rocket.

"Julie Payette was a real inspiration," she said, referring to the Montreal-born astronaut who flew on the shuttle Discovery in 1999. Last year Kaveh-Moghaddam was an intern at the CSA, where her project focused on Martian weather. As the junior field engineer in Utah, she sees herself as the mission's jack-of-all-trades.

Living like extraplanetary pioneers will mean scrimping on showers and figuring out how to grow fruit and vegetables in the experimental greenhouse. Otherwise, the menu will be strictly limited to what a regular crew might be expected to survive on during a prolonged voyage - think peanut butter and vacuum-packed mixes, with chocolate and freeze-dried "astronaut ice cream" for dessert.

A bigger challenge will be seeing how eight strangers get along when they are cooped up for two weeks in a tiny space. Unlike E.T., they won't be able to phone home, although they will be permitted to check email at restricted intervals.

"Crew dynamics is a huge factor when you go to a place like Mars," Faragalli said. He hasn't met the other team members, although they've chatted on Skype and sent one another jokes to break the ice. "Having a sense of humour is very important."