Paul Solokoff
Paul Solokoff “explores Mars” – on Earth.With NASA’s discovery of water trickling down Mars’ canyon and crater walls as well as the movie release of The Martian this month, the Red planet is all the craze and curiosity lately.
The Canadian Museum of Nature on McLeod Street boasts its own, personal link to Mars: a botanist, Paul Sokoloff, who is considered the real-life version of the main character in the blockbuster film.
The Martian tells the story of how astronaut Mark Watney gets stranded on Mars. The character, played by Matt Damon, is a botanist who uses everything he knows about his specialization to find a way to survive.
Back on Earth, Sokoloff has done fieldwork in Canada’s cold and dry High Arctic, a landscape considered to be the most “Martian-like” environment on the planet, according to NASA.
“My interest is biodiversity, and specifically I’m interested in where plants grow in the Arctic and what are the factors that cause them to grow and spur in certain places,” Sokoloff says. “I’ve always been curious about what’s out on the land.”
A self-proclaimed nerd with a passion for space and plants, Sokoloff found a way to marry the two by participating in a Mars simulation in Utah last year.
“It was pretty surreal. It’s pretty remote. The desert is such that you don’t see anyone as far as all the way out to the horizon,” he says of his time at the Mars Desert Research Station in the U.S. “Everything you do, your research your extracurricular actives, a.k.a. going outside, was very tightly controlled by mission control.”
Sokoloff brought his plant specimens back to Ottawa and is hoping to get more involved with Mars mission preparations. It’s no surprise he’s been nicknamed “Canada’s Matt Damon” by his colleagues.
In these simulations, crews work to conduct research in their specializations as if they were astronauts on Mars.
Paul Knightly, an environmental geologist working in Kansas and Arizona, acted as crew commander in Sokoloff’s simulation.
“You’ve got the constraints of wearing your space suit and even the time constraints – how long you can be outside,” Knightly says. “That all effects what sort of work you’re able to perform and then how you’re able to perform it.”
“Those are small little things that need to be taken into account and that’s why we do simulations: to try and figure out what those issues are while we’re here on Earth and then to help prepare astronauts to handle those,” he says.
The Mars Society in Colorado conducts simulations as realistic as possible to gather knowledge for future space expeditions.
“The main idea is to try to figure what might work well on Mars – it’s an operational simulation,” says Robert Zubrin, president of the Mars Society. “You cannot do this on paper. You cannot do this with people staying in a (habitat), or in a room, in an apartment somewhere, and just watching how much water they use.”
Zubrin says these simulations investigate crew morale and teamwork, the amount of water needed on a daily basis and how to best deal with the psychological and physiological stressors of being confined in small spaces with the same individuals over time.
“Basic engineering information comes out from these simulations – information you need to design the mission,” Zubrin says, referring to water storage and rocket design.
Chosen from over 200 volunteers, both Sokoloff and Knightly will be a part of a nine-member, international crew to Devon Island, a desolate location in Nunavut, for a year-long Mars simulation sometime in the future.