DEVON ISLAND, Nunavut -- For six weeks this summer, a rough uninhabited island in the Arctic Circle became the focus of preparations for a human journey to Mars and a search for life there.

Devon Island is within a thousand miles (1,600 kilometers) of the North Pole, just 200 miles (320 kilometers) west of Greenland's northwest coast and 1,700 miles (2,735 kilometers) north of the U.S.- Canada border. It lies 75 degrees north of the equator, further north than Alaska's northernmost point.

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The setting might sound like a rendezvous point deigned by some gang of UFO enthusiasts as a place to group and await further instructions.

Instead, more than 50 scientists, engineers and technologists across a wide range of disciplines gathered on Devon Island in the Canadian High Arctic to develop technologies and test strategies that will be needed if humans one day decide to send astronauts to Mars.

For four years, the island has been the staging ground for NASAs Haughton-Mars Project, which has expanded from a three-week, four-man group of planetary scientists camping in Haughton Crater to a two-month operation as a permanent research station.

The trivial reasons for using Devon Island as a Mars test-bed, said Pascal Lee, a planetary scientist at the SETI institute and NASAs Ames Research Center and principal investigator of the Haughton-Mars project, are its climate and remoteness. Those features make Devon Island the closest thing to Mars on Earth. The Island is a polar desert -- a very dry environment with almost no vegetation and extremely cold average temperatures.

"Of course, [Mars today] is much more extreme and much more hostile," Lee said. "The radiation environment on Mars is much worse than here. The atmosphere, of course, is thinner, and the composition of the atmosphere is different. But by terrestrial standards, this is one of the places that approximates Mars fairly well."

The comet or asteroid that created the crater was perhaps more than a mile (up to 2 kilometers) across and slammed into the forest that existed on Devon Island. Everything was annihilated for scores of miles in all directions. The impact churned up rock from more than a mile below the surface, vaporizing much of it.

"Probably only a few percent of it comes back down, although we dont really know. A lot of it gets vaporized, so it just turns into gas, but a lot of it just goes up into the atmosphere as dust," said Osinski, who has spent the past two summers doing field work at the crater.

While clouds of dust and gas filled the air, rock rained down from the sky, much of it in the form of what geologists now call breccia, which simply means "broken up." The breccia is composed of rock that was smashed to smithereens by the impact and then re-welded together. It now stands in tremendous piles as light-gray rubble draped across the landscape in and around Haughton Crater.

Scattered within the breccia are pieces of a rock called gneiss that normally is dark and dense. In Haughton Crater breccia, the "shocked gneiss" resembles pumice stone -- it's ash-white, porous and very lightweight.

Pascal Lee suspects that this rock was blasted with such force that certain minerals in the rock were vaporized, leaving behind a porous ghost of the gneiss it originally was.

The crash meant a quick end to the plants and animals that lived on Devon Island at the time.

The fossil record shows that the site was populated with pine and deciduous trees, giant rabbits and a species of small rhinoceros. This is quite a curiosity in itself, considering that 23 million years ago, the island was already high in the Arctic, and so experienced long seasons of constant sunlight or continuous darkness.

"I think for the beings, the animals that were here, they might have only seen a flash of light and then they would have been wiped out instantaneously by the air blast," Lee said.

Interesting, too, is that after the impact the crater became a lakebed. It filled with water and over millennia sedimentary layers built up. These layers may hold clues about ancient seasonal variations in the time after Haughton Crater was formed. And those clues could help researchers at Mars.

There is even talk of bringing astronauts to Haughton Crater to prepare them for human missions to Mars. Lee said astronauts could benefit from training there, studying the landscape and tuning their eyes to recognize the kinds of rocks that are foreign to the surface, that come from greater depths of the planet.

Work is being conducted to study the lakebed deposits that built up in the crater bottom, with hopes that scientists can decipher clues to past climate. Biologists are searching for fossils within these lake sediments in order to learn how astronauts or exploratory robots might do the same in lake deposits on Mars.

Ancient hydrothermal vents are of keen interest because areas where heat and water coincide hold the greatest promise for supporting life. If geologists can find a pattern that helps them predict where such vents on Mars might exist, they would be able to more easily target efforts to search for life on Mars.

"The NASA Haughton-Mars Project is above all about studying the site scientifically," Lee said. "We are not going to Utah or Arizona where the geology is well-known, and were pretending were doing fieldwork. Here were engaged day after day in the process of exploring this place.

And so in addition to the science program, were building a program of exploration research. Were learning at the same time using this opportunity of ongoing fieldwork in science to learn how exploration is done."