NASA Volunteers Start Living on Artificial Mars for Up to a Year
An interesting piece of information for the future, is "NASA volunteers start living on Artificial Mars for up to a year". The four volunteers entered a simulation of the planet Mars, where they are expected to stay for 378 days starting Sunday (06/25/2023).
They will be faced with various challenges designed to anticipate real-life human missions to the red planet.
Participants will perform a series of mission activities
The participants, research scientist Kelly Haston, structural engineer Ross Brockwell, emergency medicine physician Nathan Jones, and Navy microbiologist Anca Selariu, were selected from a pool of applicants to be part of NASA's Analog Exploration of Crew Health and Performance, or CHAPEA, on the year-long mission. None of them were trained astronauts
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| From left to right: Alyssa Shannon, Ross Brockwell, Kelly Haston, and Nathan Jones. (Photo: NASA) |
"Thank you for your dedication to exploration," said Grace Douglas, mission principal investigator at NASA, during a Sunday briefing before they entered the simulation. "Our best wishes are on your shoulders."
Haston, Brockwell, Jones, and Selariu will spend more than a year living and working in a simulated Mars environment built at Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.
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During their stay inside the 1,700-square-foot 3D print, the crew is set to perform a series of mission activities, including simulated spacewalks, robotic surgery, growing plants, environmental maintenance, personal hygiene, and exercise.
At 1,700 square feet, it's smaller than the average U.S. single-family home, which includes a kitchen, private crew quarters, and two bathrooms, along with medical, work, and recreation areas.
Their crews will also face a series of obstacles that likely mirror actual Mars missions, as researchers simulate conditions such as resource limitations, equipment failures, communication delays, and environmental stresses.
"The simulations will allow us to collect cognitive and physical performance data to give us more insight into the potential impact of long-term missions to Mars on crew health and performance," Douglas said.
"Ultimately, this information will help NASA decide to design and plan a successful human mission to Mars."
The mission is the first of three planned Mars surface simulations, each expected to last one year.
NASA says the information gathered and learned during this mission, along with ongoing exploration taking place on and around the moon, will help send the first astronauts to Mars in the future.
That's today's information about "NASA volunteers start living on Artificial Mars for up to a year". Hopefully, the experiment provides good news for all of us.