The Mars Amity Research Station (MARS) whose construction is currently underway aims to be India's first party to establish a planetary simulation station in a remote planetary analogue site, the cold desert of Ladakh and have highly visible and tangible presence as a leader and research Astrobiology, Space Biology, Climate Change, Sustainable Energy, Education and Space Experience Tourism.
The MARS Project is being co-designed with due consideration to the Tso-Kar communities of the Changthang plains, the MARS station will undertake collaborative research with the indigenous people to enable documentation and preservation of their storied traditional knowledge relating to the ecology and their commensurate cosmology. This research is instigated to provoke a cross disciplinary pollination between the science based knowledge production of the this centre promises to be a fount of and the existing knowledge stewarded by these communities.
This search is undertaken with Dr. Siddharth Pandey, Prathima Muniyappa, Dr. Daniella Scallice, NASA’s astrobiology program, and Annalea Beattie, who studies the role of art for communities in extreme environments.