From the Haughton Crater on Devon Island, in Nunavut, to scuba diving for carbonates in British Columbia, to the Atacama desert-the world’s driest-in Chile, to Antarctica. Sound like a compelling backpacking yarn?

Well, it’s all in a year’s work for Dr. Darlene Lim-and fun to boot, as she insists. She is a hands-on geobiologist who regularly travels to places in the world that are either cold and frozen, or hot and parched.

Lim completed her Master’s and PhD at U of T, in 1999 and 2003 respectively, observing climate change in the Canadian high Arctic. She was taken with the place on her first trip there, in 1997.

Then, in 1999, just as she was figuring out her doctoral thesis, she fell in with the space exploration crowd at a conference of of the Mars Society-an organization whose purpose statement begins boldly: “The time has come for humanity to journey to Mars.”

Lim was one of three panelists at an event at the newly opened MaRs research complex last Wednesday. Titled Forecasting the future, the panel is part of a series dubbed In Conversation with Maclean’s, meant to mark that magazine’s centenary.

Now a post-doctoral researcher at NASA’s Ames Research Centre, in California, Lim studies Mars analogues-geographic regions and features on Earth that closely resemble conditions on the red planet.

She is a staunch advocate of space exploration, and an active member of the Mars Society. At the society’s research site in Nunavut, Lim said, “People dressed me up in suits and asked me to test future Mars prototype suits, to see how I felt in them.”

Throughout, she insisted that now is the time to reach for the moon-and beyond.

“It’s too bad we haven’t gone back to the moon sooner.” This would have allowed space flight to advance, she speculated, to the point where manned missions to Mars may have been a feasible feat right now. “I wish that we were at that point now-that we hadn’t given up in 1972.”

Is the moon Lim’s next must-see destination? “That would be an incredible journey,” she gushed. And that may not be too far-fetched, either. Given that Lim is only 33, and the first moon flight a mere 13 years away, it is not entirely inconceivable she may be one of the scientists brought along on one of the later moon missions.