Mars colony hopefuls will soon have a practice home here on Earth

Mars One is still roughly 10 years away from launching its first colonists to the Red Planet, but they're not sitting idle in the mean time. With their list of candidates reduced down to a more manageable number, plans are now being put into effect to build a place for these people to live and train — a little simulated slice of Mars right here on Earth.

"We are very eager to get started constructing actual hardware for our mission that is important for training future Mars One crews and preparing them for their life on Mars," said Mars One co-founder Bas Lansdorp, according to a press release. "We are going from theory to practice."

According to Mars One's mission roadmap, potential colonists are expected to begin their training starting in 2015. Just like the colony on Mars, the location for the simulated colony must be carefully chosen. However, instead of looking for a location with the best combination of water content in the soil and potential solar energy (like a rover mission is expected to do in the first years of the 2020s), they'll be considering some of the driest and most remote locations on Earth.

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Fortunately, this isn't the first time someone has built a Mars simulation mission, so there are some great examples to follow. NASA has already identified some of the best parts of the world to use as locations for these simulations, based on what their environment is like compared to what we see on Mars.

The Mars Society's Mars Analogue Research Station Program has already set up stations in two of these locations. The Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station (FMARS) was built on Devon Island, in the Canadian Arctic, in 2000, and it was followed by the Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS), in the Utah desert, in 2002. Both have remained in operation since. Another mission, the Hawaii Space Exploration Analogue & Simulation (HI-SEAS), started up in 2013 and was located in a remote part of the Big Island of Hawaii. Yet another, the Morocco 2013 Mars Analog Field Mission, took place in February of 2013 in the northern Sahara Desert.

Researchers that join these missions must live and work together inside the small habitat provided, and they only venture outside while wearing bulky environmental suits, just as they would on Mars. One big difference between these missions and a true mission to Mars is that the researchers only spend about two weeks at the station and then they go back home, whereas anyone going to Mars with the Mars One mission will not be coming back. Another big difference is that if you happen to get a little stir crazy on one of these simulations, and either run outside without your environmental suit on or pop your helmet off suddenly if you're already outside, the environment is a lot more forgiving. You probably get sent home from the mission, but at least you're alive.

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That's what these simulations are for, though, to test what it would really be like to live in such a dry, inhospitable and lonely place as the planet Mars. There are 1,058 potential colonists in the Mars One program as of Dec. 30, 2013, and that number will be reduced down to just 24 people by 2024, when the first launch is scheduled to leave. Roughly nine years of training should be plenty of time to figure out if they'd end up going stir crazy or if they'd persevere.

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