Posted by tourdemars to Humans To Mars at November 30, 2004 12:16 AM

Ray Bucklin can remember when "Mars jars" were sprouting up in laboratories around the country. In the years after the Viking probes landed on the surface of Mars, many scientists spent their spare time building bottle-like devices that replicated the thin air or the surface of the Red Planet — and using them to see whether plants could survive under Martian conditions. Now Bucklin and his graduate students at the UF's Institute of Food and Agricultural Science (UF/IFAS) have put together a Mars jar to beat them all — a room-sized chamber in which the researchers can test models of greenhouses that could one day be built on the Red Planet.