Pavilion Lake Research Project:

Nuytco is pleased to be returning to Pavilion Lake, BC, for the 2010 field season of the Pavilion Lake Research Project (PLRP).

Based in a remote lake the Interior of British Columbia, Canada, the PLRP centres around biological/geologial formations called 'microbialites'. These strange structures look for all the world like tropical coral reefs!

Funding for the 2008 and 2009 project years was by the Canadian Space Agency's (CSA) Canadian Analogue Research Network programme, with additional funding coming from NASA's Astrobiology Science and Technology for Exploring Planets and Spaceward Bound Programs, and the National Geographic Society. NASA and CSA astronauts and scientists from several other institutions (including McMaster University and UBC) piloted the ‘DeepWorker 2000' subs, surveying and acquiring high def underwater video of these colonies as part of the Mars Project.

(Huh, Mars??)

Yep. The PLRP has presented an opportunity to advance the long-term objective of human exploration of the Moon and Mars by combining research on life in extreme environments with high fidelity training in an underwater, remote field setting. The information gained from this analogue project will help to improve the knowledge base, tools and techniques of future human missions to the Moon, Mars and beyond.

To go to the project web page (external link) and see the DeepWorkers in action, click here.