A catalogue of places on Earth where one can find Mars-like conditions might include Antarctica’s Dry Valleys, Devon Island in the Canadian Arctic, the hyper-acidic Rio Tinto in Spain, and Chile’s bone-dry Atacama Desert. But it probably wouldn’t include Brooklyn.
And yet it’s in Brooklyn where, in an otherwise unexceptional warehouse, Honeybee Robotics has installed a massive stainless steel chamber whose interior environment can be made more Mars-like than most anywhere else on Earth. Eleven feet tall, three feet square, its walls one-and-a-half inches thick, its doors studded with a dozen small square windows, the whole thing looks like refrigerator on steroids.