Kristine Ferrone has survived Mars – or a simulation of the Red Planet, anyway.

During the summer of 2009, Kristine Ferrone and five other volunteers lived for a month in a cramped habitat built on the edge of a 39-million-year-old crater carved out by a meteorite. The barren Canadian island site was about as close as you can get to a Mars-like environment on Earth.

The simulation was an opportunity to conduct geophysical...