DEVON ISLAND, Canada — NASA doesn't plan to launch humans to Mars 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 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 that 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.

"This is Mars on Earth," Lee said.

Each summer, two teams of explorers and scientists who want to go to Mars settle instead for Devon Island's unearthly landscape. 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 collection of small and large tents, rises out of a dusty plateau within sight of the 12-½-mile-wide crater at the center of the island. The second outpost, 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 boulders ejected from the crater 23 million years ago and snow patches that don't melt even in the heart of summer.

Next best thing

"Mars analogs," as Devon and places like it are called, have become all the rage among planetary scientists. National Aeronautics and Space Administration scientists use extreme locations around the globe — the volcanoes of Antarctica, Norway's Svalbard islands and the Mojave 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 went to the glaciers of Svalbard to work the kinks out of a Jet Propulsion Laboratory "cryoscout" drill that one day could bore into Mars' northern ice cap.

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 again will 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 bacteria 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.

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.

Dedication

Researchers 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," said Robert Stewart, a University of Calgary geophysicist who spent several weeks at the base last summer. "And I'm Canadian."

Born in Hong Kong and reared in France by a Chinese father and French mother, Lee has yearned to travel to Mars since he was a child avidly following Voyager's journey through the solar system in the late 1970s and early '80s.

"I swore when I left graduate school I would spend every waking minute trying to get a human mission to Mars," Lee said.

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.

Lee, now nearing 40, is beginning to realize the first footsteps probably will 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. He co-founded the nonprofit Mars Institute last year to raise money to promote the scientific exploration of Mars.

While NASA and the Canadian Space Agency support Lee's work, the camp on Devon largely is 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.

Second camp

The second camp on Devon is run by the Mars Society, a nonprofit formed in 1998 to further the long-range goal of the human colonization of Mars.

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. A cluster of small 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 is testing a new generation of spacesuits that include Borg-like computers inside the helmets that beam information onto explorers' face shields.

At 300 pounds, NASA's shuttle suits 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 also are useless for walking because they have no leg joints. "It's not a walking suit, it's a floating suit," Lee said.

Simple tasks challenging

While the science thrills those who work here, daily life often 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 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.

Easy compared to 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 have occasional "freshies," such as 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.