From Thwaites Glacier to the Moon: How Polar Exploration and Space Borne Missions are Linked

Monday - September 25 2023, 22:43 UTC - 1 year ago

Tara Sweeney visited Thwaites Glacier in January 2023 to study its geology and ice fabric, and its potential contribution to sea level rise. Through her experience, she observed that polar exploration and space borne missions are linked and attended the 2023 Analog Astronaut Conference held at Biosphere 2 in Oracle, Arizona. There, she and other participants discussed the psychological toll of reintegration following analog astronaut missions.

In January 2023, Tara Sweeney’s plane landed on Thwaites Glacier, a 74,000-square-mile mass of frozen water in West Antarctica. She arrived with an international research team to study the glacier’s geology and ice fabric, and how its ice melt might contribute to sea level rise. But while near Earth’s southernmost point, Sweeney kept thinking about the moon. "It felt every bit of what I think it will feel like being a space explorer," says Sweeney, a former Air Force officer who’s now working on a doctorate in lunar geology at the University of Texas at El Paso .

"You have all of these resources, and you get to be the one to go out and do the exploring and do the science. And that was really spectacular." That similarity is why space scientists study the physiology and psychology of people living in Antarctic and other remote outposts: For around 25 years, people have played out what existence might be like on, or en route to, another world. Polar explorers are, in a way, analogous to astronauts who land on alien planets .

And while Sweeney wasn’t technically on an "analog astronaut" mission—her primary objective being the geological exploration of Earth—her days played out much the same as a space explorer’s might. For 16 days, Sweeney and her colleagues lived in tents on the ice, spending half their time trapped inside as storms blew snow against their tents. When the weather permitted, Sweeney snowmobiled to and from seismometer sites, once getting caught in a whiteout that, she says, felt like zooming inside a ping-pong ball .

On the glacier, Sweeney was always cold, sometimes bored, often frustrated. But she was also alive, elated. And she felt a form of focus that eluded her on her home continent. "I had three objectives: to be a good crewmate, to do good science, and to stay alive," she says. "That’s all I had to do." None of that was easy, of course. But it may have been easier than landing back on the earth of El Paso .

"My mission ended, and it’s over," she says. "And how do I process through all these things that I’m feeling?" Then, in May, she attended the 2023 Analog Astronaut Conference, a gathering of people who simulate long-term space travel from the relative safety and comfort of Earth. Sweeney had learned about the event when she visited an analog facility in the country of Jordan. There, she’d met one of the conference’s founders, Jas Purewal, who invited her to the gathering .

The meeting was held, appropriately, at Biosphere 2, a glass-paneled, self-contained habitat in the Arizona desert that resembles a 1980s sci-fi vision of a space settlement—one of the first facilities built, in part, to understand whether humans could create a habitable environment on a hostile planet. The 40-acre Biosphere 2 campus in Oracle, Arizona, was one of the first facilities built for analog astronaut missions .

UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA A speaker at the conference had spent eight months locked inside a simulated space habitat in Moscow, Russia, and she talked about how the post-mission period had been hard for her. The psychological toll of reintegration became a chattering theme throughout the whole meeting.