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Welcome to the official post-season site of the MIT Space Logistics Project 2005 Haughton-Mars campaign!

This is a revised website that incorporates all the field season postings, as well as our completed and in-progress reports and publications.

During the field season, we posted daily to our field website, where readers checked our daily updated e-logbook, looked at pictures, heard the news about polar bear sightings, etc.

Student explorers with the MIT Banner
Student explorers with the MIT Banner

About the Expedition

The 2005 expedition to the Haughton-Mars Project research station on Devon Island was part of a NASA-funded project on Space Logistics. A team of nine researchers from MIT went to the Canadian Arctic to participate in the annual HMP field campaign from July 8 to August 12, 2005. We investigated the applicability of the HMP research station as an analogue for planetary macro- and micro-logistics to the Moon and Mars, and began collecting data for modeling purposes. We also tested new technologies and procedures to enhance the ability of humans and robots to jointly explore remote environments.

The expedition had four main objectives:

  1. define and validate a set of functional supply classes for space logistics
  2. understand the nodes, transportation routes, vehicles, capacities, and crew/cargo mass flow rates required to support the HMP logistics network
  3. test new automated technolgoies and procedures for inventory tracking, such as radio frequency indentification (RFID), in the context of exploration logistics
  4. understand the micro-logistical requirements of conducting both short and long traverses in the Mars-analog terrain on Devon Island

More information on each of these topics can be found in the publications section. [These paragraphs are paraphrased from the Executive Summary of the HMP Final Report].

Further information on space logistics and on HMP can be found in the background section of this site, while field reports and data analysis are stored in the data archive.

Home | Background | Logbook | Pictures | Publications | Data Archive