A young man from Saint-Eustache who dreams of becoming an astronaut was one of the few Quebecers invited to a prestigious NASA internship that took him to a Martian-looking island in Nunavut.

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“As soon as the plane landed on the island, we felt like we were on another planet,” says Mathieu Gagnon, an engineering student at the École de Technologie Supérieure (ÉTS).

As the only Canadian on a team of 15 NASA researchers isolated in Nunavut, the 24-year-old spent three weeks on the island of Devon testing equipment for Mars bases.

NASA’s Haughton Mars Project tests various devices such as off-road vehicles and new spacesuit prototypes. For the young man who wanted to be an astronaut since childhood, it was like getting closer to his dream.

“I was nervous at first, but the whole team made me feel like I had my place in the group,” he said at the end of his stay on the island where the sun never sets. Never during the summer months.

Plead your case

Although this internship is typically limited to Americans, Mathieu wrote to program director Pascal Lee last spring to make his case. And he agreed to waive the admission criteria and accepted this young rocket enthusiast from Saint-Eustache.

For the budding engineer, who has been attending the Laval Cosmodôme and the Montreal Planetarium since childhood, donning spacesuits to perfect the prototypes for future interplanetary flights was a “wonderful experience.”

But beyond the anecdote, the young man did real science. He is already working on the creation of scientific articles that address the conclusions of the field tests.

Like on Mars

He also reports the impression of having experienced the simulation of a long stay on an extraterrestrial base.

NASA

“We were so isolated that we experienced a bit of what people who will one day be sent to a moon or Mars base will experience,” continues the student, who owes his integration to a team of experts from the American space agency. partly also his boldness.

Devon, the world’s largest uninhabited island, shares several geological similarities with conditions on the planet Mars: vast desert plains with craters reminiscent of the Red Planet’s volcanic formations. Another similarity is the cold climate (-5 to 5°C in summer). That’s why experiments have been carried out there every year since 1997.

The US mission to Devon Island, the Haughton Mars Project, is part of a program to establish permanent communities on Mars by 2040.

The 2023 edition essentially consisted of three parts:

1. Test a new rover that can be used on Mars.
2. Testing rocket launches in a permafrost context.
3. Test the advantages and disadvantages of different spacesuits.