To Mars, Alice!

Sez Wired:

Inside a chamber about the size of a small fridge in Greenville, Indiana, scientists are taking the first steps toward creating human settlements on Mars.

The chamber, called the Martian Environment Simulator, was put together by scientific engineering company SHOT and NASA's Institute for Advanced Concepts. Scientists are using it to determine how to grow plants in greenhouses on other planets, and hope it will eventually aid people living and working on Mars, as well as provide insight to the evolution of planetary life.

Terraforming, it's called. If anyone is even remotely interested, the process (and politics) of Martian terraforming was explored in great (at times laborious) detail in Kim Stanley Robinson's great early 1990s "Mars trilogy" of sci-fi novels--Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars. They're weighty tomes, and Robinson can get a bit bogged down in technical jargon and minutiae, but it's a dynamite series.