Mars on Earth: Simulation tests in remote desert of Oman

Two scientists in spacesuits, stark white against the auburn terrain of desolate plains and dunes, test a geo-radar built to map Mars by dragging the flat box across the rocky sand.

In this Feb. 7, 2018, photo, two scientists test space suits and a geo-radar for use in a future Mars mission in the Dhofar desert of southern Oman. (AP Photo/Sam McNeil)

When the geo-radar stops working, the two walk back to their all-terrain vehicles and radio colleagues at their nearby base camp for guidance. They can't turn to their mission command, far off in the Alps, because communications from there are delayed 10 minutes.

But this isn't the red planet — it's the Arabian Peninsula.

In this Feb. 7, 2018, photo, two scientists test space suits and a geo-radar for use in a future Mars mission in the Dhofar desert of southern Oman. (AP Photo/Sam McNeil)

The desolate desert in southern Oman, near the borders of Yemen and Saudi Arabia, resembles Mars so much that more than 200 scientists from 25 nations chose it as their location for the next four weeks, to field-test technology for a manned mission to Mars.

This Feb. 7, 2018, photo shows João Lousada, a flight controller for the International Space Station, wearing an experimental space suit during a simulation of a future Mars mission in the Dhofar desert of southern Oman. (AP Photo/Sam McNeil)

Public and private ventures are racing toward Mars — both former President Barack Obama and SpaceX founder Elon Musk declared humans would walk on the red planet in a few decades.

New challengers like China are joining the United States and Russia in space with an ambitious, if vague, Mars program. Aerospace corporations like Blue Origin have published schematics of future bases, ships, and suits.

This Feb. 7, 2018, photo shows João Lousada, a flight controller for the International Space Station, wearing an experimental space suit during a simulation of a future Mars mission in the Dhofar desert of southern Oman. (AP Photo/Sam McNeil)

The successful launch of SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket this week "puts us in a completely different realm of what we can put into deep space, what we can send to Mars," said analog astronaut Kartik Kumar.

This Feb. 7, 2018, photo shows analog astronaut Kartik Kumar wearing an experimental space suit during a simulation of a future Mars mission in the Dhofar desert of southern Oman. (AP Photo/Sam McNeil)

The next step to Mars, he says, is to tackle non-engineering problems like medical emergency responses and isolation.

"These are things I think can't be underestimated," Kumar said.

This Feb. 7, 2018, photo shows João Lousada, a flight controller for the International Space Station, wearing an experimental space suit during a simulation of a future Mars mission in the Dhofar desert of southern Oman. (AP Photo/Sam McNeil)

While cosmonauts and astronauts are learning valuable spacefaring skills on the International Space Station — and the U.S. is using virtual reality to train scientists — the majority of work to prepare for interplanetary expeditions is being done on Earth.

And where best to field-test equipment and people for the journey to Mars but on some of the planet's most forbidding spots?

This Feb. 7, 2018, photo shows João Lousada, a flight controller for the International Space Station, wearing an experimental space suit during a simulation of a future Mars mission in the Dhofar desert of southern Oman. (AP Photo/Sam McNeil)

Seen from space, the Dhofar Desert is a flat, brown expanse. Few animals or plants survive in the desert expanses of the Arabian Peninsula, where temperatures can top 125 degrees Fahrenheit, or 51 degrees Celsius.

On the eastern edge of a seemingly endless dune is the Oman Mars Base: a giant 2.4-ton inflated habitat surrounded by shipping containers turned into labs and crew quarters.

There are no airlocks.

This Feb. 7, 2018, photo shows analog astronaut Kartik Kumar wearing an experimental space suit during a simulation of a future Mars mission in the Dhofar desert of southern Oman. (AP Photo/Sam McNeil)

The desert's surface resembles Mars so much, it's hard to tell the difference, Kumar said, his spacesuit caked in dust. "But it goes deeper than that: the types of geomorphology, all the structures, the salt domes, the riverbeds, the wadis, it parallels a lot of what we see on Mars."

The Omani government offered to host the Austrian Space Forum's next Mars simulation during a meeting of the United Nation's Committee On the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space.

Gernot Groemer, the commander of the Oman Mars simulation and a veteran of 11 science missions on Earth, said the forum quickly accepted.

In this Feb. 7, 2018, photo, analog astronaut João Lousada, center, hands his colleague Kartik Kumar a drone while two Omani men watching in front of the Mars simulation base camp in the Dhofar desert of Oman. (AP Photo/Sam McNeil)

Scientists from across the world sent ideas for experiments and the mission, named AMADEE-18, quickly grew to 16 scientific experiments, such as testing a "tumbleweed" whip-fast robot rover and a new spacesuit called Aouda.

The cutting-edge spacesuit, weighing about 50 kilograms (110 pounds), is called a "personal spaceship" because one can breathe, eat and do hard science inside it. The suit's visor displays maps, communications, and sensor data. A blue piece of foam in front of the chin can be used to wipe your nose and mouth.

The sun rises over a 2.4-ton inflated habitat used by the AMADEE-18 Mars simulation in the Dhofar desert of southern Oman on Thursday, Feb. 8, 2018. (AP Photo/Sam McNeil)

"No matter who is going to this grandest voyage of our society yet to come, I think a few things we learn here will be actually implemented in those missions," Groemer said.

The Soviet Union's 1957 launch of Sputnik ignited a space race between Moscow and Washington to land a crew on the Moon.

But before the U.S. got there first, astronauts like Neil Armstrong trained suspended on pulleys to simulate one-sixth of Earth's gravity.

Hostile environments from Arizona to Siberia were used to fine-tune capsules, landers, rovers, and suits — simulating otherworldly dangers to be found beyond Earth. Space agencies call them "analogues" because they resemble extraterrestrial extremes of cold and remoteness.

"You can test systems on those locations and see where the breaking points are, and you can see where things start to fail and which design option you need to take in order to assure that it does not fail on Mars," said João Lousada, one of the Oman simulation's deputy field commanders who is a flight controller for the space station.

Faux space stations have been built underwater off the coast of Florida, on frigid dark deserts of Antarctica, and in volcanic craters in Hawaii, according to "Packing For Mars," a favorite book among many Mars scientists, written by Mary Roach.

"Terrestrial analogs are a tool in the toolkit of space exploration, but they are not a panacea," said Scott Hubbard, known as "Mars czar" back when he leads the U.S. space agency's Mars program. Some simulations have helped developed cameras, rovers, suits and closed-loop life-support systems, he said.

NASA used the Mojave Desert to test rovers destined for the red planet but they also discovered much about how humans can adapt.

"Human's adaptability in an unstructured environment is still far, far better than any robot we can send to space," Hubbard said, adding that people, not just robots, are the key to exploring Mars.

The European Space Agency's list of "planetary analogues" includes projects in Chile, Peru, South Africa, Namibia, Morocco, Italy, Spain, Canada, Antarctica, Russia, China, Australia, India, Germany, Norway, Iceland, and nine U.S. states. Next Thursday, Israeli scientists are to run a shorter simulation in a nature preserve called D Mars.

However, there remain so many unknowns that simulations "are not in any way a replacement for being there," Hubbard said.

The Oman team's optimism is unflinching.

"The first person to walk on Mars has in fact already been born, and might be going to elementary school now in Oman, or back in Europe, in the U.S. or China," Lousada said.

JOHANNESBURG (AP) — When South African infectious disease specialist Lucille Blumberg checked her email on the morning of May 1, while the country was celebrating the Labor Day holiday, an urgent message caught her attention.

A U.K.-based colleague had written about a passenger from a cruise ship sailing thousands of miles away in the Atlantic Ocean who had been evacuated and admitted to a Johannesburg hospital with suspected pneumonia. Others aboard the vessel were also sick.

The colleague, who monitors diseases in remote British overseas territories in the South Atlantic Ocean, asked Blumberg to follow up on the passenger, who had been evacuated from the ship in one of the territories, Ascension Island.

Blumberg and other experts at South Africa’s National Institute for Communicable Diseases were suddenly thrown into the race to identify the cause of an outbreak aboard the Dutch cruise ship MV Hondius.

“Even though it was a public holiday, we moved, we moved really fast," Blumberg told The Associated Press. "It was busy. There were many conversations. There were online discussions, and there was laboratory testing happening at the time.”

Within 24 hours, they had determined that the man’s illness was caused by hantavirus, a rare rodent-borne virus. While he is improving, three other passengers have died and others have fallen sick.

The elderly British man had arrived at a private hospital in Johannesburg days earlier and was seriously ill, but health workers weren’t sure of the underlying cause.

By the time he was evacuated from the ship, two elderly Dutch passengers who had been on board the MV Hondius cruise liner had already died, but there had been little alarm. Ascension Island health authorities had reported a cluster of illnesses on the ship that appeared to be pneumonia to the World Health Organization.

At first, Blumberg and her colleagues thought it might be Legionella, a bacterium that causes a serious form of pneumonia, Legionnaires’ disease. Or maybe bird flu.

"I called my infectious disease colleagues, and we had a caucus, and we discussed the usual ones,” Blumberg said. “Legionella is well described in outbreaks in hotels and on cruise ships, and influenza certainly is. These people had visited islands where avian influenza is well documented.”

Tests on all those were negative. The experts also ran an extensive panel of tests for other respiratory diseases. Also, all negative.

The team then began looking more closely at where the ship came from — Argentina — and the fact that passengers on board were avid bird watchers and had reportedly been to parts of South America where there were birds, but also rodents.

That pushed the South African disease experts toward another theory: the rare, rodent-borne hantavirus infection, which is found in parts of South America.

“It’s a well-described, not common, but it’s a well-described virus in Chile and Argentina,” Blumberg said. She added that their work was aided by collaboration with hantavirus experts from South America and the United States, facilitated by the WHO, the U.N. health agency.

“You can get onto a Zoom (call) online and ask your questions and get advice. This is not something every day. So that was quite extraordinary,” Blumberg said.

By then, it was Saturday morning. Blumberg called the head of the only laboratory in South Africa that can test for hantavirus.

“I said, we want to do hanta, and she said, ‘yeah, I’m coming.'”

The tests, carried out on the sick man's blood samples, came back positive for hantavirus that afternoon. The team did a second set of tests to be sure, Blumberg said.

Those positive tests, which also identified the Andes strain of hantavirus, allowed the WHO to inform the cruise ship what it was dealing with and announce an outbreak on board. While hantavirus is not easily spread from person to person, the WHO says the Andes virus can be transmitted between people.

The test results also led Blumberg to rush to collect blood samples from a Dutch woman — one of the first two cruise passengers to die — who had disembarked from the ship with her husband's body on the island of St. Helena and flown to South Africa, where she died.

A posthumous hantavirus test on her was also positive.

“It was a bit of a wow moment,” Blumberg said. “And at least once you know what you’re dealing with, it’s much easier to respond.”

The British man who was the first confirmed case of hantavirus infection from the cruise ship is improving in hospital, South Africa's health ministry has said. Meanwhile, the ship has arrived at the Dutch port of Rotterdam, where it was disinfected, and the remaining crew members disembarked.

“I’ve been doing outbreaks for 25 years. That’s what we do. We do them every day," she said. "I think the important thing was to respond immediately to a question that clearly was urgent and then to take it from there.”

AP coverage of the cruise ship hantavirus outbreak: https://apnews.com/hub/hantavirus

The MV Hondius cruise ship arrives at the Port of Rotterdam, Netherlands, Monday, May 18, 2026. (AP Photo/Patrick Post)

People in protective gear remove waste from the MV Hondius cruise ship after its arrival at the Port of Rotterdam, Netherlands, Monday, May 18, 2026. (AP Photo/Patrick Post)