COLUMN ONE
'This Is Mars on Earth'
 It's frozen, dusty and isolated, and for scientists yearning to travel to the Red Planet, this Canadian island is their summer home.

By Usha Lee McFarling, Times Staff Writer

DEVON ISLAND, Canada — NASA doesn't plan to launch humans to Mars anytime soon, so Pascal Lee decided to drive.
      First came miles of seemingly endless ridges of ice and expanses of grayish-yellow rock. Then yawning canyons and, in the distance, the rim of a massive meteor crater. Through the frosted windshield, Lee scanned the terrain for the myriad dangers of this alien landscape: snowdrifts capable of swallowing his Humvee, a precariously thin skin of ice on the frozen ocean and really hungry polar bears.
      It's not quite Mars, but for aficionados of the Red Planet, it's the next best thing. It's Canada.
      More precisely, it's Devon Island, the world's largest uninhabited land mass and a place so desolate even the hardy Inuit forsake it. For Lee, a Mars expert at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., it was love at first sight when he first saw the island's unearthly landscape in 1997.
      "This is Mars on Earth," Lee said.
      Each summer, two teams of explorers and scientists who want to go to Mars settle instead for this frozen patch of real estate south of the North Pole. Here, they mimic, as best they can, the harsh and isolated conditions of a scientific base camp struggling to establish itself on an alien planet.
      One camp, a set of small and large tents, rises out of a dusty plateau within sight of the 12 1/2-mile-wide crater that ravaged the center of the island. The second homestead, a two-story, cylindrical metal living module, sits at the crater rim. Cold wind often whips the sites; yellow-brown dust covers visitors and their gear as soon as they arrive. There are no reminders that a civilized world lies to the south. On the horizon are huge rock blocks ejected from the crater 23 million years ago and snow patches that don't melt even in the heart of summer.
      "Mars analogs," as Devon and places like it are called, have become all the rage among planetary scientists. NASA scientists use extreme locations around the globe — the volcanoes of Antarctica, Norway's Svalbard islands and the Mohave Desert — to test rovers, crawling robots and other technology against the same cold, dry bleakness they expect to find on Mars.
      "We want to test things in the harshest possible environment on Earth to see how they behave," said Scott Anderson, a University of Hawaii geophysicist who braved temperatures of 4 below zero atop the glaciers of Svalbard to work the kinks out of a Jet Propulsion Laboratory "cryoscout" drill that could one day bore into Mars' northern ice cap.
      Here on Devon, about 60 scientists, Mars buffs and local Inuit guides test the merits of spacesuits wired with internal computers and vehicles they can use for multi-night sojourns away from camp. They also test their own ability to forgo bathing, and be surrounded by unbathed colleagues who often turn surly as soap and hot water become memories.
        "A geek element is almost required," said Lee, who heads the project and has turned away hundreds of volunteers hoping to live on "Mars."
       Lee's camp opened July 4 when two charter planes dropped 11 people — geologists, biologists, computer experts and the camp cook — onto the island. Two dozen more will join them for shorter research stints until the camp closes the first week of August, when the weather will once again turn wintry.
      This is a high-tech science lab with a hefty dose of macho summer camp. Some crew members spend their days in lab tents culturing bacterial samples or building electronic sensors. Others send remote-controlled airplanes soaring into blue skies or roar off on all-terrain vehicles to explore distant valleys. The rifles slung over their backs are protection against the massive white bears, the only other large mammals on the island.
      With no human Mars mission planned by NASA, some see the idea of living on a faux-Mars as slightly half-baked, or at least far, far ahead of its time. They believe a more prudent approach would be to wait for a spaceship that could make the journey, or perhaps some money to pay for it. Then, the testing of remote computer networks, spacesuits and such refinements as environment-friendly toilets or mood-enhancing interior designs might make more sense.
      "It's kind of putting the cart before the horse," said Louis Friedman, executive director of the Planetary Society, a Pasadena-based group that advocates a human mission to Mars.
      But stalwarts of Mars exploration believe the camps on Devon are a necessary first step in laying the groundwork and encouraging NASA to speed plans for sending humans to the Red Planet.
      Researchers here are committed to their quest, no matter how many frozen dinners they have to eat, how many barrels of urine they have to haul back to civilization or how much snow collects on their tents as they shiver through frigid Arctic summer nights.
      "I was freezing," admitted University of Calgary geophysicist Robert Stewart, who spent several weeks at the base last summer. "And I'm Canadian."

Red Planet Stand-In

With its rock-littered plains, meteor crater and networks of braided river systems that stand dry in summer, Devon looks an awful lot like the surface of Mars. When the wind howls and camp members are out on the dry, frozen landscape in spacesuits, it's not hard to imagine this bleak pocket really is an alien world.
      Temperatures range from 50 below in winter to 50 above in summer. The 25,000-square-mile island is more than 100 miles from the nearest Inuit settlement, the hamlet of Resolute Bay. The North Pole is 1,000 miles to the north.
      The island's only permanent inhabitants are two unfortunate sailors buried in permafrost, who died on Sir John Franklin's ill-fated search for the Northwest Passage more than 150 years ago.
      Like Mars, the scarred surface of Devon was shaped by massive ice sheets and meteor strikes. The two locales are so similar physically, experts looking at satellite photos often cannot tell them apart.
      "As long as no one's in front of you," said Jaret Matthews, a recent Purdue University graduate who lived on Devon last summer, "you're immediately transported to Mars."
     Mars is actually far more wretched.
       Dusty winds on the planet gust over 110 mph. Temperatures fall to 200 degrees below zero. Strong solar radiation would fry human DNA. In the planet's reduced gravity, muscles would waste away. The thin carbon dioxide atmosphere would instantly kill anyone without a life-support system.
      Lee can't wait to go.

Born in Hong Kong and raised in France by a Chinese father and French mother, Lee has yearned to travel to Mars since he was a child avidly following Voyager through the solar system in the late 1970s and early '80s.
     He studied a traditional science track in France in the late 1980s, then earned a doctorate from Cornell University in New York for work on asteroids. He worked on a NASA mission, the Mars Observer spacecraft, until it was lost in 1993. He found the work interesting but too removed from his dream.
      "I swore when I left graduate school I would spend every waking minute trying to get a human mission to Mars," Lee said.
       With the current grounding of all human space flight since the Columbia space shuttle accident and NASA still flinching from the loss of several robotic Mars probes in recent years, high-level discussions of a human Mars mission have all but stopped.
       Such a trip would require an estimated $1 trillion and widespread international cooperation. Designing a habitable spacecraft to complete the journey and then return would be among the largest engineering projects in history. Some experts say it could be a century before humans set foot on Mars.
      Now nearing 40, Lee is beginning to realize the first footsteps will probably not be his. Still, he wants to do everything he can to pave the way for others.
     "If we are ever to go any further, we have to master Mars," he said.
       Lee's many trips to Devon are a good start. He first visited the island's crater in 1997 and deemed it Mars-like enough to host a study crew. Last year, he co-founded the nonprofit Mars Institute to raise funds to promote the scientific exploration of Mars. While NASA and the Canadian Space Agency support Lee's work, the camp on Devon is largely paid for by science grants and donations. Many visitors, including journalists and space enthusiasts, pay $200 a night or more for the privilege of sleeping on the frozen ground.
         The second camp on Devon is run by the Mars Society, a nonprofit group formed in 1998 to further the long-range goal of the human colonization of Mars.

Surviving the Summer

For now, mastering Mars means surviving another Devon summer. The accommodations are crude. At Lee's camp, communal life takes place in a series of large tents that serve as kitchen, meeting hall, dining room and science lab. ATVs, the transport of choice, are usually parked outside. A cluster of small backpacking tents set amid the rocks make up the sleeping quarters. Making life even harder is the fact that everything brought here — from pork chop bones and Power Bar wrappers to human waste — must be scrupulously collected and brought back out on bush planes.
      This summer, the team will test a new generation of spacesuits that include Borg-like computers inside helmets that beam information onto explorers' face shields. NASA's shuttle suits, 300 pounds in Earth weight, are far too heavy. Even on Mars, where the force of gravity is weaker, the suits would feel as though they weighed more than 100 pounds. The current model spacesuits are also useless for walking because they have no leg joints. "It's not a walking suit, it's a floating suit," Lee said.
      Other work includes trying to understand how life can take hold with so little encouragement. Devon is littered with surprising niches. A big clump of moss might reveal an Arctic fox underneath — a valuable source of food in this nutrient-starved environment. Rare patches of lichen feed on age-old seagull droppings.
     Devon's geology has already given the scientists insight into one of the biggest mysteries on Mars. Freshly carved gullies here that look exactly like ones on Mars may prove water once flowed there. A leading theory is that the Martian gullies are the product of snowmelt. Lee suspected that years ago because of his work on Devon.
     While the science thrills those who work here, often daily life does not. Sleeping in the constant daylight of the Arctic summer is difficult. Walking across the windy plains to reach the bathroom tent late at night when polar bears are lurking is an expedition in itself. In the cold and wind, simple tasks such as putting up a tent are a challenge. Building permanent housing can be even harder.
     The Mars Society suffered a minor disaster in 2000 after a helicopter drop went awry, crushing a construction crane and plywood flooring needed for living quarters, said Robert Zubrin, the society's president.
     The team rigged a rickety scaffold and built got their cylindrical "habitation module," but not without a hefty dose of ingenuity. A seemingly simple job turned into a weeks-long ordeal that probably would have been fatal had the group been on Mars.
      While technology is one aspect of planning for a mission, the focus here is on the weakest, most fragile link of any long mission: the humans.
      Zubrin's group has endured experiments to determine how little water they could use — and still stomach each other. They found it was half the amount budgeted by NASA if they only took cold sponge baths every other day.
     They became guinea pigs for NASA human space flight experts who wanted to see what bedroom posters would keep a Mars crew happiest. The answer: It didn't matter. If people on Mars are as overworked as those on Devon, they will spend barely any waking hours in their bunks.
     "Just doing this tends to rub really obvious things in your face," said Zubrin, whose group also supports a year-round "hab" in the Utah desert and is planning for another amid the volcanoes of Iceland.
     One major concern for long-term missions to Mars is making sure teams get along, stay productive and stay sane. A common theme of sci-fi thrillers set on Mars are crew members who snap.
      Devon has seen tension between the groups that camp here. Last summer, the teams were not on speaking terms even though they lived within sight of each other. They often met in awkward silence at the airplane runway when supplies came in. "It was strange, almost tribal," said one participant.
     The schism is a touchy subject for Zubrin and Lee, who once worked together closely and do not discuss the split publicly. While the men have gone their separate ways, they speak politely about each others' projects.

Much Easier Than Mars

Hard and strange as life seems on Devon, it's still easy compared to what is likely on Mars — sometimes disappointingly so.
      "It's too warm. The air's too thick. There's surface water. We can breathe," said Brian Glass, a computer scientist at NASA Ames Research Center in Northern California who has worked summers at Devon since 1998. "If we wanted a real analog, we'd come in winter when it's 50 or 60 below. And we just might."
       Even determined explorers, however, have their limits. They don't eat freeze-dried space food but get occasional "freshies," like salad greens and ripe plums, delivered by plane.
      "We had one lettuce salad one night and we all still remember it," said Alain Berinstain, a chemist at the University of Guelph in charge of the Canadian Space Agency's Mars plans.
       They feel no guilt accepting new DVD movies and top-shelf liquor from visitors who have passed through duty-free shops at Ottawa's airport. Tins of smoked oysters and packets of dried mangos circulate through the dining hall. And camp residents often walk outside tents to smoke, an unthinkable pleasure on a spacecraft or space colony where every ounce of oxygen is precious.
      At one point, scientists bandied about the idea of using plants in the new greenhouse to process urine into drinking water, a process that could be necessary on Mars or other space colonies where fresh water would be a rare commodity.
     The allure of Mars is strong. But not that strong.
     "No one," Berinstain sighed, "said they would drink it." 

Kathleen Raine, Scholar and Poet With Mystical Bent, Dies at 95
By WOLFGANG SAXON
today's New York Times

Kathleen Raine, a mystically inclined British poet and a scholar of Yeats and Blake, died on Sunday in London. She was 95.
     Less known in the United States than in Europe, where she was regarded as a grande dame of European letters, she published several books of poetry in America in addition to her scholarly works.
     Starting in 1943, she published a considerable oeuvre of her own even as she became a celebrated interpreter of the mystical poet William Blake to the English-speaking world.
      She was inspired at a very young age by the visionary elements of English romance literature, and her poetic work has a spiritual streak seeking to fuse reason and the ethereal, the knowable and faith. Her tastes were eclectic, including Jungian psychology and neo-Platonism.
     She preferred to think, citing W. B.Yeats, that "poetry and religion are the same thing." Over the years she attracted many admirers, including the Prince of Wales, who in 1990 gave his patronage to a "school of wisdom" that she founded, the Temenos Academy of Integral Studies.
      Temenos, a teaching institution, preached a universalist theme, braiding the mystical strains of Buddhism and Hinduism with Judaism, Christianity and Islam, a considerable departure from her strict Methodist early upbringing. In 1999 she began the Temenos Academy Review, which publishes selected lectures along with articles and poetry.
       Britain's Royal Society of Literature in 1991 named her one of the 10 greatest living writers. She received the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 1992 and was honored as a Commander of the British Empire three years ago.
     By then her reputation was firmly established well beyond Britain. Translations of her books on Yeats and Blake were read from Sweden to Spain. Her first volume of autobiography, "Farewell Happy Fields," was published in 1973. In France the last two parts of her three-part autobiography, "The Land Unknown" (1975), and "The Lion's Mouth" (1977), sold briskly as "Le Royaume Inconnu" (1978), and "La Gueule du Lion" (1987), and she became a commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2000.
      Kathleen Jessie Raine was born in Ilford, Essex. She studied natural sciences and psychology at Girton College, Cambridge, and graduated in 1929.
      While many of her contemporaries drifted to the political left, she explored the mystique of Celtic history, magic and astronomy. She spent the war years in and out of London in various jobs.
       She made her debut with "Stone and Flower: Poems" in 1943, followed by "Living in Time." Her first book to appear in the United States was "The Pythoness and Other Poems" in 1952. 
      In 1956 she received an appointment as a fellow at Girton, where she taught and pursued her scholarly work. 
       She was briefly married to Hugh Sykes Davies, a critic and Cambridge don, who died in 1984. Her second marriage to Charles Madge, a poet and sociologist, also ended in divorce; he died in 1996. She is survived by a daughter, Anna Hopwell Madge; a son, James Madge; four grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren.
      Kathleen Raine's works currently listed in Books in Print are "Blake and Antiquity" (Routledge; 2d ed., 2002); "Collected Poems" (Basic, 2001); "India Seen Afar" (Braziller, 1991); "Inner Journey of the Poet" (Braziller, 1982); "Defending Ancient Springs" (Anthropomorphic; repr., ed., 1985); "Golgonooza —City of Imagination: Last Studies of William Blake" (Anthropomorphic, 1991); "Presence: Poems 1984-1987" (Anthropomorphic, 1987); "Selected Poems" (Anthropomorphic, 1988); and "William Blake" (Thames Hudson, 1985).

Above: A 14th-century Tibetan mandala in bright colors and gold on cotton, created to be used in meditation and to be rolled up and carried. 

ART REVIEW | 'HIMALAYAS: AN AESTHETIC ADVENTURE' 
Galaxy of Asian Gods Is Sighted in Chicago
By HOLLAND COTTER

CHICAGO — You are traveling by bus a few hours out of Katmandu in Nepal. The sun is falling fast as the road climbs. When the bus stops to refuel, you climb out and look up at a new moon high in the sky. Then with a little surprise you look higher and see, above the moon, the snow-covered tops of mountains. 
      They are the Himalayas, and they are some of the highest places on earth. If you could continue straight through them, you would be in Tibet. A turn to the left would take you to Kashmir; to the right, east toward China. At this point you are still in the foothills, but with a single neck-craning glance you know why people believe that gods live here. 
      This summer an entire pantheon of Hindu gods has touched down at the Art Institute of Chicago, along with the Buddha and his band of spirits and saints. They are here for "Himalayas: An Aesthetic Adventure," a survey of nearly 200 sculptures and paintings, most of them on loan from North American collections, some among the finest examples of their kind. 
      The art historian Pratapaditya Pal, who organized the show, writes in the catalog that his intention was to create a masterpiece show, one based on "aesthetic excellence" rather than on focused themes or theory. That goal is disappointingly unadventurous given the idea-packed nature of the objects assembled, but Dr. Pal's success in shaping them into a truly fabulous spectacle is beyond question. The show starts in Nepal, a kingdom sandwiched between India and Tibet. Hinduism, imported from the south, is the state religion there today, and among the striking early pieces in this show is a 10th-century Nepali relief of the god Siva and his family kicking back on a craggy ledge of Mount Kailasa, their Himalayan home, in a court as crowded with dancers as a disco floor. 
    But Buddhism, technically, originated here when, in the sixth century B.C. a tribal prince named Siddartha was born in territory within Nepal's present borders. As a prince he was raised to be a ruler of men; later, as the Buddha, he learned to rule himself, by far the harder task. Many of his devotees considered him divine, and while he denied this, his image takes complex forms, human and transcendent. 
      A fabulous gilded copper sculpture on loan from the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth embodies both. Here the Buddha is an earthly sage and a savior. Lithe and youthful in a simple monk's robe, he holds one flowerlike hand open in a gesture of giving that is also a gesture of letting go: of possessions, desires, ego, everything. 
      This piece from the seventh-century A.D. has clear links to Indian art of roughly the same period. And one of the exhibition's subtexts is the flow of Indian influence into the Himalayas, where it produced many diverse but related styles. The mechanics of that diffusion remain something of a mystery, however, in part because Himalayan material remains understudied, but also because so much of it has been lost.
      Only a relatively small amount of ancient Hindu and Buddhist art survives, for example, from what is now the predominantly Muslim state of Jammu and Kashmir in India. Yet the ancient religious sculpture of this region adds up to one of the great art traditions of Asia, and the show — which travels in reduced form to the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington in the fall — would be irresistible for its Kashmiri section alone. 
     It includes some wonderful Hindu pieces, among them an eighth-century relief of Kamadeva, the god of love, surrounded by his sexpot consorts. But it is Buddhist sculpture that takes the prize, its power distilled in three stellar works. One, a renowned gilded bronze from the Norton Simon Foundation, depicts the Buddha at the instant of enlightenment, sitting on a cushion patterned with silver and copper inlay, a Kashmiri specialty. In another he looks as regal as a Byzantine emperor, with honey-gold skin and hypnotic, silver-inlaid eyes. 
      The third and grandest image centers around three bodhisattvas — spiritual beings who stay in the world to guide mortal creatures to salvation — preening on lotus-shaped platforms like Olympic medal winners. The entire ensemble, with its gilded aureole of swirls and swags, has a baroque exuberance that would have been enhanced by the flickering light of oil lamps in the dark interior of a shrine. 
     Color and interesting complications arrive with a 12th-century painting from western Tibet in which the Buddha, dressed in a snazzy patchwork robe, keeps company with a Hindu god or two. Such interfaith meetings are not unusual. Buddhism routinely lifted elements from other religions. The same was true of Hinduism, which adopted the Buddha as an incarnation of the god Vishnu. Hybridity had a lot to do with the success of both religions, and you can see it in action here: what looks like a baby-blue dove hovering over the Buddha's head is actually Garuda, the half-human, half-bird creature who served as Vishnu's mount. 
       Eclecticism is certainly the name of the game in the show's large final section of art from central and eastern Tibet, with its suggestion of sources as far flung as Persia and China. This is the kind of Himalyan material most familiar from Western collections, though Dr. Pal's choices are refreshingly varied, from a bronze bodhisattva modeled on Indian sculptural ideals — the body is a composite of plant and animal forms — to an exquisitely executed painting of the holy man Virupa, drunk and disorderly, and stopping the sun in its tracks in order to delay last call at the bar. 
      Images as entrancing as these would seem to disarm any reservations about the show's aestheticist agenda. But I wonder. Progressive thinking about art in the 1990's emphasized the social dynamics of art and the political implications of concepts like "beauty," while conservative voices warned that such thinking would produce a crushing tidal wave of theory-heavy, object-poor shows. 
     The reality is, that wave never hit. Connoisseurial concerns continue to be privileged just as they have always been. In the field of Asian art challenges to historical orthodoxy have on the whole been tentative and fleeting. Yet for some reason, perhaps spurred by the current political climate, the protests go on and have recently grown even louder, with calls for museums to get back to art-speaks-for-itself basics, as if they had ever put such shopworn attitudes aside. 
      "Himalayas: An Aesthetic Adventure," with its travel-brochure title and its boilerplate gorgeousness, steers close to such an approach. True, I would gladly travel to Chicago again before Aug. 17, when the show closes, for another lingering look: the objects are that beautiful. But they are also carriers of revolutionary concepts about personal, social and political transformations of a kind we barely comprehend and that the exhibition barely touches on. The art in question is life changing rather than merely life enhancing. Intellectually as well as materially, it scales the heights. Shouldn't exhibitions strive to do the same?

PRICKLY SHARK
The strangely shaped prickly shark has sharp skin instead of scales, making it feel sandpaper-like instead of smooth. A large liver filled with oil creates buoyancy and lets the shark hang in the water without swimming.

(CNN) -- Many of the known denizens of the deep look as bizarre as their names: Snotthead. Fangtooth. Gulper eel. So what about the creepy creatures that lurk in unchartered depths? A team of international scientists was determined to find out. 
    This month, they are examining their catch from a deep-sea expedition in the Southern Hemisphere, more than 1,500 species photographed or collected from unexplored waters along the sea floor between New Zealand and Australia. 
     The haul includes a sea spider with organs in its legs, a shark with sandpaper-like skin and a squid with a big eye to find prey and a little one to avoid becoming it. 
    "If you lived in pitch black, hunted by feeling vibrations or looking for the tiniest glimpses of light, withstood massive pressures and had to wait for months at a time to feed, you'd end up looking like Gollum as well," said Mark Norman, a biologist who rode on the research vessel Tangaroa, which completed a month-long voyage in June. 
     Norman's reference is to a gruesome character in J.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings," but some specimens photographed, netted or dredged by the Tangaroa crew down to depths of 1.2 miles (two kilometers) were too weird for science fiction or fantasy. 
   The flabby coffinfish walks on the sea floor on short leg-like fins and can swallow large volumes of water to expand into a ball, making it less appealing
to predators. 
    The Pacific spookfish uses its snout like a metal detector, scanning for the electrical impulses of prey hidden in the mud. Goblin shrimp have twisted faces and heavy-plated armor. 
      And rather than live in shells, which are scarce on the ocean floor, one variety of hermit crab dwells inside the tough, leathery bodies of zonathid, a relative of coral with stinging tentacles. 
  Many in the Tangaroa catch are relatives of known species, but a preliminary tally suggests there are more than 100 new species of fish and invertebrates, according Norman, senior curator of the Museum Victory in Australia. 
     The expedition, dubbed NORFANZ because it sailed near Norfolk Island and was a joint project of Australian and New Zealand, hopes to shed light on the depths of the Tasman Sea, one of the least understood, watery recesses of the planet. 
     "Life is precious and especially adapted for every nook and cranny of this Earth," said Norman. "The deep-sea deserves as much protection and consideration as the richest of tropical rainforests."