Haughton Crater, on Devon Island, only a few hundred miles from the North Pole, is littered with shards of rock and the occasional fossil tree limb. Temperatures can be bitterly cold, even in midsummer. It is one of the most alien and unfriendly environments on Earth. That makes it an ideal place to set up a prototype Martian living space and laboratory, says Robert Zubrin, the former Lockheed Martin senior engineer who heads the project.

A NASA team is already in Haughton Crater, testing drilling equipment, pilotless helicopters and other machinery that might one day be operated by astronauts on the surface of Mars. NASA's aim is also to study the geology and environment of the crater, to determine what it might reveal about the likelihood of finding water--or life--on Mars.

"We're really interested in testing procedures," says Zubrin, who now has his own firm, Pioneer Astronautics, in Lakewood, Colo. "How do you conduct human-robot combined operations? How small a crew can you get by with, to maintain the equipment and do the science? What are the human factors involved, living in tight quarters?"

For Zubrin, the project is a stepping stone toward a private unmanned mission to Mars. All of the research is part of a larger effort to persuade NASA that a human mission to Mars is feasible within the next decade. Zubrin has founded a non-profit group called The Mars Society to pursue that goal.

Zubrin has raised $200,000 toward construction of the $1.2 million Arctic habitat, and he is confident he can raise the rest. "The first money is always the hardest," he says.