MIT 2005 Expedition to HMP
Welcome to the official post-season site of the MIT Space
Logistics Project 2005 Haughton-Mars campaign!
This is a revised website that incorporates all the field
season postings, as well as our completed and in-progress
reports and publications.
During the field season, we posted daily to our field
website, where readers checked our daily updated e-logbook,
looked at pictures, heard the
news about polar bear sightings, etc.
About the Expedition
The 2005 expedition to the Haughton-Mars Project research
station on Devon Island was part of a NASA-funded project
on Space Logistics. A team of nine researchers from MIT went
to the Canadian Arctic to participate in the annual HMP field
campaign from July 8 to August 12, 2005. We investigated the
applicability of the HMP research station as an analogue for
planetary macro- and micro-logistics to the Moon and Mars,
and began collecting data for modeling purposes. We also tested
new technologies and procedures to enhance the ability of
humans and robots to jointly explore remote environments.
The expedition had four main objectives: (1) to define and
validate a set of functional supply classes for space logistics;
(2) to understand the nodes, transportation routes, vehicles,
capacities, and crew/cargo mass flow rates required to support
the HMP logistics network; (3) to test new automated technolgoies
and procedures for inventory tracking, such as radio frequency
indentification (RFID), in the context of exploration logistics;
and (4) to understand the micro-logistical requirements of
conducting both short and long traverses in the Mars-analog
terrain on Devon Island. More information on each of these
topics can be found in the publications
section. [These paragraphs are paraphrased from the Executive
Summary of the HMP Final Report].
Further information on space logistics and on HMP can be
found in the background section
of this site, while field reports and data analysis are stored
in the data archive.
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