Writing for Apple’s Hot News section, Barbara Gibson reports that a team of international scientists working on the Haughton-Mars project depend on PowerBooks to help them with their field research. The info comes in a new article entitled Rehearsing for Mars.
Working on Devon Island, a desolate area in the Canadian territory of Nunavut, the scientists are attempting to create a simulation of what it might be like when humans finally reach the planet Mars. They’re now in their fifth year of research. Although Devon Island isn’t a perfect recreation of the Martian surface, it’s a dry, cold arctic desert with geological features that roughly approximate some of the conditions that Martian explorers might expect to find.
The leader of the project, Dr. Pascal Lee, and his team utilize Olympus digital cameras and AirPort-connected PowerBooks equipped with Final Cut Pro to communicate with each other and process imagery they’ve collected. Lee calls the PowerBook’s capabilities “absolutely first class.”
Another scientist utilizes a pair of PowerBooks — he uses one just to capture time-lapse photography of the base itself, to get a better idea of how people react with each other in close quarters.