Year-long Mars isolation
experiment starting in Hawaii
AFP – MIAMI – Six people are about to shut themselves inside a
dome in Hawaii for a year, in the longest US isolation experiment yet aimed at
helping NASA prepare for a pioneering journey to Mars.
The crew includes a French astrobiologist, a Germanphysicist
and four Americans — a pilot, an architect, a doctor/journalist and a soil
scientist.
They are based on a barren, northern slope of Mauna Loa, living
inside a dome that is 36 feet (11 meters) in diameter and 20 feet (six meters)
tall.
In a place with no animals and little vegetation around, they
will close themselves in on Saturday, marking the official start to the
12-month mission.
The men and women have their own small rooms, with space for a
sleeping cot and desk, and will spend their days eating foods like powdered
cheese and canned tuna, only going outside if dressed in a spacesuit, and
having limited access to the Internet.
So what kind of person wants to spend a year of their life this
way?
Crew member Sheyna Gifford described the team as “six people who
want to change the world by making it possible for people to leave it at will,”
she wrote on her blog, LivefromMars.life.
Crew architect Tristan Bassingthwaighte said he will be
“studying architectural methods for creating a more habitable environment and
increasing our capability to live in the extreme environments of Earth and
other worlds,” according to his LinkedIn page.
“Hoping to learn a lot!” he added.
Any astronauts that go to Mars are facing a trip that would last
far longer than the six months that humans typically spend at the orbiting
International Space Station.
NASA s current technology can send a robotic mission to the
Red Planet in eight months, and the space agency estimates that a human mission
would take between one and three years.
With all that time spent in a cramped space without access to
fresh air, food, or privacy, conflicts are certain to occur.
The US space agency is studying how these scenarios play out on
Earth — in a program called Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and
Simulation (HI-SEAS) — before pressing on toward Mars, which NASA hopes to
reach sometime in the 2030s.
The first HI-SEAS experiment involved studies about cooking on
Mars, and was followed by a four-month and an eight-month co-habitation
mission.
NASA is spending $1.2 million on these simulations, and has just
received funding of another million for three more in the coming years
according to principal investigator Kim Binsted.
“That is very cheap for space research,” she told AFP by phone
from Hawaii.
“It is really inexpensive compared to the cost of a space
mission going wrong.”
Binsted said that during the eight-month co-habitation mission,
which ended earlier this year, conflicts did arise.
She said she could not go into detail about the nature of them,
without breaching confidentiality of the crew.
But the crew was able to work through their problems, she said.
“I think one of the lessons is that you really can t
prevent interpersonal conflicts. It is going to happen over these long-duration
missions, even with the very best people,” she told AFP.
“But what you can do is help people be resilient so they respond
well to the problems and can resolve them and continue to perform well as a
team.”
Binsted said the first scientific results from the missions
should be made public about a year from now.
Jocelyn Dunn, a crew member from the previous eight-month
mission, said she came to love the inside jokes among the crew, doing daily
workouts, and learning to cook things like bagels and pizza dough with the
ingredients on hand.
“I guess I got a taste of marriage, albeit a hexagon of
relationships rather than a dyad,” she wrote on her blog.
Then, just days after the mission ended in mid-June, she
described the joy of being “on Earth” again, eating fresh vegetables, using a
knife to cut meat, swimming, and drinking soda and champagne.
“I couldn t believe how much I had missed the flavors and
textures of a juicy steak,” she wrote.
SOURCE MUCHBLUE
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