A novel project that worked wonderfully, according to its builders, was a robot designed to skim over rough rocky surfaces, taking pictures of the ground. The device, called the Monty robot was built largely by Dale Stokes, an oceanographer at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in La Jolla, California.

Stokes came to Haughton Crater in 1999 and 2000 to study several of the craters lakes, and also to help his friend and colleague, Cambridge University biologist Charlie Cockell, with biological research. During last years field season, Stokes and Cockell spent much of their time squatting on the ground carefully measuring the percentage of ground covered by vegetation.

Charlie Cockell (left) and Dale Stokes with "Monty"

The two were studying the ways the meteor impact that created Haughton Crater had affected the areas ability to support life. They were comparing the percentage of vegetation growing on impact rocks to that growing on non-impact rocks, a process that required painstaking hours on hands and knees, often in the rain, counting spots of vegetation.

"We wanted something to try and automate our data collecting," Stokes said. " We wanted to be able to cover large areas as easily as possible."

Watch the video report of Hamilton Sunstrand engineers testing their spacesuit for Mars exploration on Devon Island.

The solution that Stokes came up with during the past year is a spindly device that takes advantage of a helium balloon to carry it across ragged terrain. Its a lightweight tripod made of thin tent poles. The end of each of the three widely spaced legs holds a wheel about the size of that on a grocery cart. At the apex of the tripod is some computer circuitry attached to an off-the-shelf digital camera aimed at the ground.

The helium balloon is about 6 feet (1.8 meters) across, and attached to the rolling tripod on a 6-foot rubber leash. It is inflated until the entire contraption is neutrally buoyant and floats barely above the ground.

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The concept beats many of the rovers that have been proposed for Mars exploration, Cockell said.

"The idea of this is that it basically glides along the ground," he explained just before the first full-fledged test of the device. "But its not actually going along with wheels, it just glides along, so basically its floating. It can go faster, its more maneuverable, and it can sort of jump over rock fields, so its much better than a rover. Its sort of a cross between a balloon and a rover."

When Stokes let go of the balloon, the Monty rover started off in the direction the wind carried it, moving at the speed of a slow trot. It crossed flat ground quickly, and when it came to rocky areas, it lightly brushed against boulders, pivoted and kept moving along with the breeze. It skirted a rough hillside and drifted down a drainage gully before Stokes and Cockell grabbed it.

"A rousing success," Stokes said of the initial test.

For Cockell, such a device would be a perfect scientific instrument to release on Mars.

"As a method of exploring vast expanses of the Martian surface and deploying a large number of exploration probes that will send back data from all areas of Mars, it really would be ideal," he said. He imagines deploying several such devices at once that could scatter about the Martian landscape and send back data on its tumble across vast stretches of the surface.

The communications system that scientists on Devon island, which supports several high-speed internet links to communicate with the outside world, is the responsibility of Stephen Braham, a computer scientist at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia.

He is a director of Poly-LAB, a research center dedicated to facilitating scientific communication over computer networks.

"We work on any type of communication involving science, from the psychology behind it right down to the physics and engineering," Braham said.

The physics and engineering on remote desert terrain like that found in the Arctic or on Mars is especially challenging, Braham said. He and others in the Haughton Mars Project are investigating how to set up reliable wireless communications systems where the landscape is rough, where the air is thin, and where the ground is a poor conductor of radio signals.

Research on Devon Island is focusing on how to use different frequencies, new communications protocols and software systems to set up comprehensive and reliable computer networks that would work on Mars. No matter where an astronaut chooses to go on Mars, he or she needs to be in constant communication with other crew members and with Mission Control on Earth. This will require a network of radio relay stations on Mars that can receive signals, clean them up, boost their power and send them on to further stations.

Setting up adequate relay systems for that is a challenge, Braham said. Also, new software protocols are needed that allow for the time lag that occurs when radio signals travel long distances between planets. Currently, when computers communicate with each other, one only sends data after it receives a signal indicating that that the other is ready to receive. The system works fine for terrestrial networks, but when a signal takes as long as 22 minutes to reach Earth from Mars, it is impractical for one machine to have to wait for assurance that something at the other end is listening.

"Were working on systems that will let us go farther and faster with better reliability than anything we have today," Braham said.

Braham envisions remotely controlled rovers outfitted with stereoscopic video cameras that could be operated by astronauts watching on monitors from their habitation module.

"And the astronauts would be able to see stereoscopically what is coming from the rover, with full 3-D view so they would know where to go and drive the rover and be able to operate it," he said.

"Thats going to give us the kind of capability we need to really explore Mars efficiently once we get there."

Mars missions will demand the sort of communications infrastructure that will allow four to six astronauts to be in constant communication with each other and have immediate access to each-others real-time video and audio signals from suit-mounted cameras and microphones, and even to monitor one anothers vital signs.

"Thats why were looking to put this high-speed network in. Its the kind of basic backbone we need to support Mars exploration," Braham said.

In addition to abundant other activities he worked on while on Devon Island, Pascal Lee, principal investigator of the Haughton-Mars Project tested out a 13-foot (4-meter) helium blimp. The mini-dirigible could be deployed above an astronauts rover to take context images of the terrain around an explorer. The blimp carried a small video camera, which transmitted images to a TV monitor mounted above the handlebars of Lees Kawasaki All-Terrain Rover.

After the blimp is filled, and paid out to the end of its 655-foot (200-meter) line, a scientist driving the rover can see the terrain all around. He or she doesnt need to climb up every ridge and hillock just to see what is on the other side. Such a tool can make exploration much more efficient, Lee said. Geologists, for instance, can better interpret local rock features if they understand something about the larger context in which these features exist.