NASA officials are keen to use the area to test robotic equipment and to train astronauts who would make the trip to Mars in the future, the paper said, quoting experts as saying that the Svalbard landscape resembles that of Mars.

Aftenposten said NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe recently visited Svalbard to look into research possibilities, and a group of Norwegian and US researchers will travel to Svalbard this summer to conduct field work.

Knut Oexnevad, a Norwegian who has spent five years working at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, called Svalbard "a first-class laboratory for our purposes" and said it could be an "excellent stand-in for Mars here on earth".

According to Hans Amundsen, a geology researcher at the University of Oslo who will lead the US-Norwegian expedition, Svalbard has "volcanoes, glaciers, warm springs that shoot up from the permafrost and landslides dotting the landscape".

Aftenposten said NASA has already done some testing on Svalbard, in particular testing an ice robot on the Longyear Glacier.

SPACE.WIRE