mars dome experiment

Scientists Just Emerged From a Year in Isolation After an Epic NASA-Funded Mars Simulation

The longest-running NASA experiment of its kind designed to simulate living conditions on Mars has come to an end, with six volunteers emerging from a year-long stay in a sealed dome in Hawaii.

For 365 days , the HI-SEAS (Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation) crew lived in isolation in a geodesic dome on the barren slopes of the Big Island's Mauna Loa, with the rocky, sparse terrain outside chosen for its similarity to the red planet's natural environment.

During the year, the team members could only leave their sealed habitat wearing space suits, and their only contact with the outside world came in the form of emails – which were delayed for 20 minutes either way, so as to emulate how long actual emails would take to send between Earth and Mars.

The experiment – funded by NASA and run by the University of Hawaii – is the longest yet in a series of ongoing HI-SEAS simulations designed to see how scientists cope with the extreme, long-term isolation that would have to be endured by astronauts and researchers during a real-life Mars mission.

While previous jaunts have seen scientists enclosed in the habitat for up to eight months, this team set a new NASA record by lasting an entire year.

But they're nowhere near the effort of Europe and China's Mars–500 team , who participated in a similar experiment between 2007 and 2011, and managed to last a staggering 520 days in a Mars simulation.

The tone from the latest HI-SEAS crew is upbeat and optimistic, suggesting that the emotional and technical rigours of a long-term stay in a sealed-off space dome are not unviable for future travellers to the red planet.

"I can give you my personal impression which is that a mission to Mars in the close future is realistic," said one of the team, French astrobiologist Cyprien Verseux . "I think the technological and psychological obstacles can be overcome."

In addition to Verseux, the crew consisted of a physicist, an architect, a soil scientist, a neuroscientist, and an engineer.

This bunch not only had to contend with being isolated from the rest of humanity, but also with having to live in such close proximity to each other in extremely confined quarters – the dome measures just 11 by 6 metres (36 by 20 feet).

"It is kind of like having roommates that just are always there and you can never escape them," mission commander Carmel Johnston told media this week, "so I'm sure some people can imagine what that is like, and if you can't then just imagine never being able to get away from anybody."

Everything the crew survived on during their year 'on Mars' they had to bring with them, meaning they essentially ate a lot of things like powdered food and canned tuna.

In addition to serving as guinea pigs so we can better understand the psychological effects of spending so long in a sealed environment, the researchers also ran a number of experiments, such as examining how to extract water from arid terrain, which could end up meaning the difference between life and death on Mars.

"Showing that it works, you can actually get water from the ground that is seemingly dry," said German researcher Christiane Heinicke . "It would work on Mars and the implication is that you would be able to get water on Mars from this little greenhouse construct."

But the biggest challenge was staving off boredom, with the team having to devise ways of keeping themselves entertained, such as learning salsa dancing and playing the ukulele.

"We were always in the same place, always with the same people," Verseux said .

His advice to new volunteers who will take part in new long-term HI-SEAS isolation experiments beginning in 2017 and 2018? "Bring books."

The team is now being debriefed, and research looking at how well they fared psychologically during their 12 months of isolation is expected to be published in the coming months.

And the sweet part of the deal for us is that, since NASA recently made all the research it funds available for free , we won't have to wait too long to find out just what happens during a year in (almost) space.

But for now, the researchers are entitled to a holiday, and what better place to enjoy a little R&R than Hawaii? And you don't just have to take it from me:

Congrats to NASA and the scientists taking us a step closer to Mars. Now enjoy Hawaii and get a shave ice! https://t.co/lFZjSnn38x — President Obama (@POTUS44) August 29, 2016

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One year on 'Mars': Inside NASA's ultra-realistic isolation study

by Lucie AUBOURG

Kelly Haston, who led the CHAPEA-1 mission, says spending a year in a simulated Mars habitat has made her reconsider the reality of life on the Red Planet

Sealed inside a habitat in Texas and cut off from the outside world for over a year, Kelly Haston was the commander of a first-of-its-kind simulation for NASA to prepare for a future mission to Mars.

From conducting mock "Marswalks" to tending to a vertical garden, and occasionally grappling with boredom— Haston expressed pride in advancing the cause of space exploration while admitting the experience made her reconsider the reality of life on the Red Planet.

"Going to space would be an amazing opportunity," the 53-year-old biologist told AFP. "But I would say that it would be harder having experienced this, to know how it feels to leave your people."

The overarching goal of the experiment, called CHAPEA (Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog) Mission 1, is to better understand the impacts of isolation on a crew's performance and health.

The project lasted 378 days and concluded in early July.

After all, a round-trip to Mars could easily take more than two years, factoring in the transit time of six-to-nine months and the time NASA hopes to spend on the planet.

For Haston, the hardest part was clear: "I could have been in that habitat for another year and survived with all of the other restrictions, but your people—you miss your people so much."

Communications with the outside world were delayed by twenty minutes each way, simulating how long it takes a radio signal to travel between Earth and Mars.

They were also some limits on sending and receiving videos, to account for bandwidth restrictions.

Simulated 'Marswalks' took place in exterior area that recreated the Martian environment with red soil against a backdrop of cliffs

The worst feeling was when relatives or friends were experiencing rough times, said Haston. "You couldn't be there for them in real time."

Her only direct human contacts were her three teammates and fellow Mars colonists—but she insists they never went stir-crazy.

"Of course, there were times where you had crabby days, or something was bothering us, either as a crew or as an individual," she explained.

"But the communication was extremely good in this group," she said and besides, such problems were few and far between. "Up until the very end, we ate meals together."

Their 1,700-square-foot (160-square-meter) home included crew quarters, common areas and even an area for crops like tomatoes and peppers.

Called "Mars Dune Alpha" the 3D-printed habitat was installed inside a hangar at the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Simulated "Marswalks" took place in an exterior area that recreated the Martian environment with red soil and cliffs painted along the walls.

Crew members donned spacesuits and passed through an airlock to reach the "sandbox," as it was nicknamed, with tasks coordinated by their colleagues inside.

Called 'Mars Dune Alpha' the 3D-printed habitat was installed inside a hangar at the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston

"There were days where you did really wish you were outside, I can't lie," says the Canadian who now lives in California. But, to her surprise, these pangs only intensified towards the end.

Periods of boredom are an inevitable part of long space expeditions, and it was precisely this extended isolation that set CHAPEA apart from most prior "analog" missions.

Halston staved off ennui by embroidering mission symbols and images of Mars.

Of course, "analogs can't address all problems or all issues of an eventual mission to Mars," she said, though the lessons learned will aid in planning.

Each team member's food intake was meticulously documented, their blood, saliva and urine samples were collected, and their sleep habits, physical and cognitive performance analyzed.

"The food system is one of the greatest mass drivers on a human mission for human logistics, and we are going to be resource-constrained on these missions," NASA scientist Grace Douglas said on a podcast.

This makes it critical to determine the minimum necessary provisions to maintain astronauts' health and ensure the mission's success.

For now, NASA is keeping the details of the crew's tasks under wraps to preserve the element of surprise for the next two iterations of the mission. CHAPEA 2 is set for 2025.

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The Two-Way

'mars mission' crew emerges from yearlong simulation in hawaii.

Rebecca Hersher

After 365 days, the longest mission in project history, six crew members exited their Mars simulation habitat on slopes of Mauna Loa on the Big Island of Hawaii on Sunday. The crew lived in isolation in a geodesic dome set in a Mars-like environment as part of the University of Hawaii at Manoa's fourth Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation, or HI-SEAS, project. University of Hawai'i News hide caption

It has been a year since Christiane Heinicke has had an egg. Or been in a car. Or gone outside without a spacesuit.

Since last August, the German physicist has been living with five other people in a 1,200-square-foot, solar-powered dome on the side of a Hawaiian volcano in an experiment in Mars-like living. The project, known as the Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation, or HI-SEAS , ended Sunday.

LIVE on #Periscope :Inside the #hiseas habitat https: Today, the crew is back in the town of Kailua-Kona to debrief and answer the big question: What advice would they give to future would-be inhabitants? "Bring something to work on. Something meaningful to work on," Heinicke said in a video posted to Twitter on Sunday by the University of Hawaii, which is running the NASA-funded research project. "One of your biggest enemies is boredom. The other big enemies, of course, are the rest of the crew," she said, laughing. The goal of HI-SEAS is to test what it would be like for people to live on Mars, and what the project designers call "team performance and cohesion" — or how a group of strangers might handle being stuck together for 12 months. The Salt Eating On Mars? Be Sure To Pack The Tortillas Asked what she learned about how to cope with living and working with the same five people all the time, Heinicke said emergencies play a surprising role in helping people get along. At one point, for example, the system for gathering and treating water broke. To simulate life on Mars, the team received water and food only every two and four months, respectively. "Obviously, we need water, so we all needed to work on that as a group," Heinicke recalled. "If you had some arguments within the group... it really helps to have an emergency to work on together, because everyone has new motivation," she said. The study designers described the small dome where the crew lived as a "habitat," writing in a press release: "It is an open concept design that includes common areas such as kitchen, dining, bathroom with shower, lab, exercise, and work spaces. A second floor loft spans an area of 424 square feet and includes six separate bedrooms and a half bath. In addition, a 160 square foot workshop converted from a 20 foot long steel shipping container is attached to the habitat."

Living in such close quarters is difficult. Asked whether the experience left her with any close friends, Heinicke was diplomatic. "Um, well, three of them I'm definitely going to stay in very close contact with," she said.

Six people just finished a yearlong experiment living inside a dome in Hawaii to simulate life on Mars. Sian Proctor/NASA HI-SEAS hide caption

Six people just finished a yearlong experiment living inside a dome in Hawaii to simulate life on Mars.

Hundreds of people apply from around the world to be part of HI-SEAS missions; this was the fourth one. Earlier missions have each lasted four or eight months. (Another simulation that ended in 2011 in Russia lasted 520 days.)

Last year, a crew member of the Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation mission leaves the dome where they were isolated. University of Hawaii hide caption

Last year, a crew member of the Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation mission leaves the dome where they were isolated.

A committee of space experts chooses crew members they describe as "astronaut-like," and the candidate criteria include an undergraduate degree in science or engineering, at least three years of research experience or graduate study, and mental and physical strength. In addition to Heinicke, the crew for this mission included a NASA physician, a hydrologist from Montana, an MIT-trained engineer and pilot, a French astrobiologist and an architecture student from Tongji University in Shanghai.

The crew members did have access to the Internet and email, but there was a 20-minute delay to send or receive a message, to simulate the time it takes to transmit a message between Mars and Earth.

All six crew members kept blogs about the experience. In one post , the mission doctor, Sheyna Gifford, wrote about the experience of missing Earth without leaving the ground.

"For a few months after the mission first began I would have sort of waking dreams – bright moments where, for an instant, I would be standing somewhere on Earth. New Orleans. Boston Harbor. A street corner in New York City where I used to buy falafel and watch people walk their dogs. ... "Then, I would blink and it would be gone. I called them 'Earthflashes'. They lasted for a few months before fading as mysteriously as they had started."

The researchers in charge of HI-SEAS are already planning the next Mars simulations. Potential crew members can apply now to spend eight months living on the Hawaiian version of Mars in 2017 and 2018.

For Mars Missions, Sending More Women Might Make Economical Sense

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Scientists will live in a dome for 8 months to simulate Mars

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HONOLULU (AP) — Six carefully selected scientists have entered a man-made dome on a remote Hawaii volcano as part of a human-behavior study that could help NASA as it draws up plans for sending astronauts on long missions to Mars.

The four men and two women moved into their new simulated space home Thursday afternoon on Mauna Loa, settling into the vinyl-covered shelter of 1,200 square feet, or about the size of a small, two-bedroom home, for an eight-month stay.

They will have no physical contact with people in the outside world and will work with a 20-minute delay in communications with their support crew, or the time it would take for an email to reach Earth from Mars.

The NASA-funded project will study the psychological difficulties associated with living in isolated and confined conditions for an extended period.

“We’re hoping to figure out how best to select individual astronauts, how to compose a crew and how to support that crew on long-duration space missions,” said principal investigator Kim Binsted, a University of Hawaii science professor.

NASA hopes to send humans to an asteroid in the 2020s and Mars by the 2030s.

The team members on the dome project include engineers, a computer scientist, a doctoral candidate and a biomedical expert. They were selected from 700 applicants who were subjected to personality tests, background checks and extensive interviews.

“When I started, my biggest fear was that we were going to be that crew that turned out like Biosphere 2, which wasn’t a very pretty picture,” said mission commander James Bevington, a space scientist.

Biosphere 2 was a 1990s experimental greenhouse-like habitat in Arizona that became a debacle. It housed different ecosystems and a crew of four men and four women in an effort to understand what would be needed for humans to live on other planets. The participants were supposed to grow their own food and recycle their air inside the sealed glass space.

But the experiment soon spiraled out of control, with the carbon dioxide level rising dangerously and plants and animals dying. The crew members grew hungry and squabbled so badly during the two years they spent cooped up that by the time they emerged, some of them weren’t speaking to each other.

The University of Hawaii operates the dome, called Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation, or HI-SEAS, and NASA has dedicated over $2 million to the various studies at the facility.

Scientists previously lived in the dome for two other long-term NASA-funded stays — one of them lasting a year, the other eight months — to study food requirements and crew cohesion.

There are a number of other Mars simulation projects around the world, but one of the chief advantages of the one in Hawaii is the rugged, Mars-like landscape, on a rocky, red plain below the summit of the world’s largest active volcano.

The dome has small sleeping quarters for each member as well as a kitchen, laboratory and bathroom. Unlike the Biosphere 2, it will be an opaque structure, not a see-through one, and it will not be airtight.

Also, the crew will eat mostly freeze-dried foods, with some canned goods and snacks brought in, including one of Hawaii’s favorites, Spam. To maintain the crew’s sense of isolation, bundles of food will be dropped off at a distance from the dome, and the team members will send out a robot to retrieve them.

The participants will not be confined to the dome but will wear spacesuits whenever they step outside for geological expeditions, mapping studies or other tasks.

They will also wear instruments around their necks that measure their moods and proximity to other team members, and will use virtual reality devices to simulate familiar and comforting surroundings and help them get through the mission.

Follow Hawaii correspondent Caleb Jones on Twitter: https://twitter.com/CalebAP See more of his work here: https://apnews.com/search/Caleb%20Jones%20Hawaii

To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories .

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Mars scientists leave dome after 8 months isolation

A team of scientists has emerged from an eight-month stay in an isolation dome built to simulate conditions on Mars .

The "crew" has been living inside the dome -- located 8,000 feet up dormant volcano Mauna Loa -- since November 2014 as part of the Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS) Mission 3, a human performance study funded by Nasa ,

Participants have been completely cut off from the outside world, save for communications on a 20-minute delay designed to mimic the expected lag between Earth and a Mars-bound spacecraft. Their departure from the 36-foot-wide dome was also the first time they'd been allowed to leave without wearing a space suit during their stay.

Throughout the duration, the crew has been tracked by surveillance cameras and body-movement sensors in order to monitor how they worked together as a team. The dome's remote volcanic location, eerie silence and simulated airlock was designed to reconstruct a space-like atmosphere.

By tracking the crew members' performance and emotional responses during the project, Nasa hopes to help astronauts deal with communication issues, or personal problems such as stress or depression, on future missions.

Kim Binsted , a professor at the University of Hawaii and principal investigator of the study, said: " Astronauts are very stoic people, very level-headed, and there's a certain hesitancy to report problems."

She continued: "So this is a way for people on the ground to detect cohesion-related problems before they become a real issue."

Crewmembers relieved stress during their confined stay by doing yoga and team workouts, and using a solar-powered treadmill on sunny days. However, other conditions were not so forgiving, including showers limited to just six minutes per week and a diet consisting largely of freeze-dried meals.

On leaving the dome on Saturday, Jocelyn Dunn , a doctoral student at Purdue University , Indiana, expressed her relief at being in the fresh air again -- and said she couldn't wait to go for a swim. "To be able to just submerge myself in water for as long as I want, to feel the Sun, will be amazing. I feel like a ghost."

The HI-SEAS experiment is over for now. But it is by no means the first of its kind in recent history. Here are a few others, designed to test the limits of human endurance in preparation for longterm space travel:

The Mars500 project

Back in 2010-11, the European Space Agency carried out a simulated human space flight at the Institute of Biomedical Problems (IMBP) in Moscow. Six crew members were locked away in steel tubes to find out how the human mind and body would cope on a mission to Mars. At a total duration of 18 months, it's the longest experiment of its kind carried out so far. The findings revealed that isolation, stress, confinement and unusual levels of light all had a big impact on the participants' body clocks; their body temperatures alone dropped by an average of 0.4 degrees celsius during the experiment.

Mars One colony project

In 2014, Mars One announced an ambitious project to send volunteers on a one-way colony trip to Mars, and began searching for locations on which to build simulation outposts on Earth. If all goes to plan, the first settlements will depart for Mars by 2026.

The Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS)

The Mars Research Society has used the Utah desert's Mars-like terrain to build several "exploration habitats", enabling scientists to work, study and live together in conditions that mimic the Red Planet's own. Bacteria and algae from the surrounding desert are commonly studied. Some of these soil and vapour samples have been found to have signs of viable methanogens -- microorganisms that produce methane.

This article was originally published by WIRED UK

The Shameful Controversy Over Olympic Boxer Imane Khelif

Six People Isolated In A Dome Complete Yearlong NASA Experiment

The scientists, pretending to be astronauts, lived in a dome on a remote part of Hawaii for 365 days to simulate what a space mission to Mars might be like.

BuzzFeed News Reporter

Six scientists on Sunday completed a yearlong isolation mission in a geodesic dome that they could only leave while wearing spacesuits.

Scientists emerged on Sunday from the 1,000-square-foot dome on Hawaii's Mauna Loa to a throng of reporters.

The six scientists — Carmel Johnston, Christiane Heinicke, Sheyna E. Gifford, Andrzej Steward, Cyprien Verseux and Tristan Bassingthwaighte — have been in the dome for 12 months to learn about challenges that might face future manned missions to Mars, like managing resources, growing food, and working out conflicts.

Cyprien Verseux @CyprienVerseux Back to Earth tomorrow (Sunday)! See you soon! https://t.co/ThnBAcLRcG #hiseas 08:14 PM - 27 Aug 2016 Reply Retweet Favorite

Just like in deep space, the crew members could only communicate with family and friends via a 20-minute delay and could only leave the dome in an elaborate mock spacesuit.

Christiane Heinicke, who is a German physicist and engineer, said that she was most excited to leave behind the spacesuits.

"The suits do prevent you from hearing and feeling your surroundings," Heinicke said to BuzzFeed News. "No sound of your own steps makes it past the fan noise and every rock feels like the inside of your suit gloves."

Mauna Loa is considered an ideal location for the mission because of its relative remoteness and the terrain, which appears Mars-like with its red, rocky slopes.

The study is funded by NASA and run through the University of Hawaii . It's Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation's fourth mission of its kind, and the longest to date.

When asked what they would do first upon leaving the dome, Heinicke said, "Finally, swimming in the Pacific!"

The program is currently seeking applications for the next two isolation missions, which will send teams back to mock Mars in 2017 and 2018 for eight months each.

Amazing Photos From Hawaii Reveal What It’s Like On A Simulated Mars Mission

buzzfeed.com

Six Strangers Are Living In A Dome To Prepare For Life On Mars

Leaving the dome: Scientists emerge from year-long isolation in NASA project simulating life on Mars

One year ago, six scientists stepped into a small isolation dome meant to mimic what life would be like on Mars. On Sunday, the six-member team emerged, and are telling their stories

You can save this article by registering for free here . Or sign-in if you have an account.

Article content

One year ago, a physicist, a pilot, an architect, an astrobiologist, a journalist and a soil scientist stepped into a 10-by-six metre isolation dome located near Hawaii’s Mauna Loa volcano.

Yesterday, the six-member team emerged from the dome.

Funded by NASA, the Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation, or “Hi-SEAS” is used to test what effects isolation might have on a future Mars crew, and is part of NASA’s goal to send a human to Mars by 2030.

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The recent year-long mission was the longest and most recent of three NASA-backed Mars simulations, with the previous two lasting eight and four months.

Sheyna Gifford, one of the crew members, waited with anticipation on Sunday as the mission came to a close. The group could only communicate through email, and messages were delayed by up to 23 minutes in each direction to simulate the amount of time it takes for a signal to reach Earth from Mars.

“The hatch is opening in 11 minutes. Soon, for the first time in a year, I’ll be able to exchange words with someone outside this dome in real time,” Gifford wrote in an online diary entry.

During the simulation, the team had to survive with scarce resources; they brought in everything they needed at the beginning of the mission, including flatbread, powdered cheese, and dehydrated vegetables. They were also allowed to leave the dome occasionally to walk on the volcanic land, but only while wearing heavy spacesuits.

But the physical test of life on Mars might not pose as much of an obstacle for a future mission than the social and psychological conditions of the crew. Before a human ground mission on Mars even starts, a team will spend seven months in a claustrophobic pod hurtling through space.

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Welcome to sMars. A last view of Earth from @HI_SEAS . Thank you @SpaceX for the excellent door mat. #occupymars pic.twitter.com/3UynfAGx3I — Sheyna Gifford (@humansareawesme) August 29, 2015

According to Kim Binsted, Hi-SEAS’ lead investigator at the University of Hawaii, the recent mission was a test of human “cohesion and performance,” and throughout the year the crew was intentionally subjected to emergency simulations such as power outages and broken equipment. Given the small space, the team had very little privacy.

They also reported having vivid, waking dreams — Gifford calls them “Earth-flashes.” Near the two-month mark, she described moments of feeling like she was back on Earth, experiencing everyday life:

“The fleeting scene would be completely immersive: I would hear, see, smell, and feel the place I was standing, down to the warmth of the pita sandwich in my hand. Then, I would blink and it would be gone.”

She speculated that the human brain might create vivid fantasies to compensate for a plain, unchanging environment.

During a similar experiment by European Space Agency in 2011 that lasted 520 days, the participants reported sleep issues and psychological problems caused by “dullness” day after day.

French crew member Cyprien Verseux said he became irritated by small changes in the dome, describing how he reacted after the team installed a new water pump.

“The sound is slightly different from that of the previous pump, and it felt strange,” he explained. “A simple, barely noticeable difference in the sound of a water pump made me react, because all the sounds I usually hear are extremely familiar.”

Throughout the course of the stay on “Mars,” the NASA crew talked a lot about soil during dinner, arguing as scientists often do about definitions and subtypes. Besides, the conversation was relevant to maintaining the pea and kale crops they had cultivated.

But on the evening of July 15, 2016 the team remembered silence during dinner. Verseux had just informed them about the terror attacks in Nice, and was refreshing his computer for updates. With limited access to static websites, and no way of connecting to social media, the information came mostly from friends through email.

But Verseux found a way to make light of his frustration, joking sarcastically about the fragmented reports he had received.

“Based on the emails I’ve received from French fellows, I will come back to a post-apocalyptic France traveled by jobless people fighting cops in the flooded streets of Paris, while teenagers catch pocket monsters with their phones,” he wrote shortly after.

The arrival back to the real world comes with challenges as well. While being in isolation has the advantage of not getting sick, the lack of exposure means that the group’s immune systems have not had a chance to produce antibodies against a year’s worth of cold and flu viruses.

The Hawaii group are nonetheless optimistic that future teams will be able to find ways to deal with the psychological challenges of a Mars mission.

“I can give you my personal impression which is that a mission to Mars in the close future is realistic,” Verseux said during a recent press conference. “I think the technological and psychological obstacles can be overcome.”

Hi-SEAS is recruiting willing people for their next isolation tests in Hawaii in January 2017 and January 2018. Each simulation will last eight months.

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Scientists will live in a dome for 8 months to simulate Mars

The NASA-funded project will study the psychological difficulties associated with living in isolated and confined conditions for an extended period.

"We're hoping to figure out how best to select individual astronauts, how to compose a crew and how to support that crew on long-duration space missions," said principal investigator Kim Binsted, a University of Hawaii science professor.

NASA hopes to send humans to an asteroid in the 2020s and Mars by the 2030s.

"When I started, my biggest fear was that we were going to be that crew that turned out like Biosphere 2, which wasn't a very pretty picture," said mission commander James Bevington, a space scientist.

For more news videos visit Yahoo View , available now on iOS and Android .

The University of Hawaii operates the dome, called Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation, or HI-SEAS, and NASA has dedicated over $2 million to the various studies at the facility.

Scientists previously lived in the dome for two other long-term NASA-funded stays — one of them lasting a year, the other eight months — to study food requirements and crew cohesion.

Also, the crew will eat mostly freeze-dried foods, with some canned goods and snacks brought in, including one of Hawaii's favorites, Spam. To maintain the crew's sense of isolation, bundles of food will be dropped off at a distance from the dome, and the team members will send out a robot to retrieve them.

The participants will not be confined to the dome but will wear spacesuits whenever they step outside for geological expeditions, mapping studies or other tasks.

Follow Hawaii correspondent Caleb Jones on Twitter: https://twitter.com/CalebAP See more of his work here: https://apnews.com/search/Caleb%20Jones%20Hawaii

Mock Mars Crew Emerges from Dome in Hawaii After 8 Months of Isolation

After spending eight months simulating life on Mars on the slopes of the Mauna Loa volcano, six "astronauts" emerged from their Hawaiian habitat on Sunday (Sept. 17) to return to civilization.

This concluded the fifth mock Mars mission of the NASA -funded HI-SEAS program (Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation). Operated by the University of Hawaii, this research project studies how groups of interplanetary travelers would work together on long-term missions while in cramped quarters.

During the mission, four men and two women lived in isolation from the rest of planet Earth and could eat only shelf-stable foods and occasional lab-grown vegetables. When communicating with the outside world, they had to deal with the 20-minute delay that astronauts on Mars would experience as well. And any time they went outside, they had to put on their spacesuits. [ In Photos: 8 Months on 'Mars' with the HI-SEAS Mission V Crew ]

HI-SEAS V crewmembers Brian Ramos and Laura Lark walk around the mock Mars habitat.

The Mission V crew entered the HI-SEAS dome on Jan. 19 . During their eight-month stay on Mauna Loa, the world's largest active volcano, they conducted scientific experiments, performed daily exercises and maintained equipment in and around the dome. Outside the dome, the astronauts did geological fieldwork in their spacesuits just as if they were on Mars.

While HI-SEAS studies the more technical and practical aspects of living on Mars, a large part of the investigation is to see how a group of people live together in isolation with little to no privacy. [ On Months-Long Missions, How Durable Is An Astronaut's Mind? ]

"Long-term space travel is absolutely possible," Laura Lark, IT specialist for HI-SEAS V, said in a video. "There are certainly technical challenges to be overcome. There are certainly human factors to be figured out, that’s part of what HI-SEAS is for. But I think that overcoming those challenges is just a matter of effort. We are absolutely capable of it."

The HI-SEAS V crew poses for a group photo after completing their mock Mars mission on Sept. 17. From left to right: Brian Ramos, Laura Lark, Ansley Barnard, Samuel Payler, Joshua Ehrlich, James Bevington

After the crew emerged from the HI-SEAS dome at 9 a.m. EDT (1300 GMT), they " felt the sun and wind on their faces and ate fresh tropical papaya, pineapple and bananas with friends and family," University of Hawaii officials said in a statement .

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"My advice to mission six is say, 'Yes.’" HI-SEAS V health and performance officer Brian Ramos said in the video. "If you have an opportunity whether it’s filming or learning a new science skill or flying the drone, going out to a lava tube, whatever it is, say, "Yes.' Take leadership on things. Honestly, you can come out of here in eight months learning a ton of stuff." [ We Visited Mock Mars: Here's What It's Like to Live There ]

The next HI-SEAS mission, HI-SEAS VI, is scheduled to begin in 2018 and will also last eight months.

Email Hanneke Weitering at [email protected] or follow her @hannekescience . Follow us @Spacedotcom , Facebook and Google+ . Original article on Space.com .

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: [email protected].

Hanneke Weitering is a multimedia journalist in the Pacific Northwest reporting on the future of aviation at FutureFlight.aero and Aviation International News and was previously the Editor for Spaceflight and Astronomy news here at Space.com. As an editor with over 10 years of experience in science journalism she has previously written for Scholastic Classroom Magazines, MedPage Today and The Joint Institute for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. After studying physics at the University of Tennessee in her hometown of Knoxville, she earned her graduate degree in Science, Health and Environmental Reporting (SHERP) from New York University. Hanneke joined the Space.com team in 2016 as a staff writer and producer, covering topics including spaceflight and astronomy. She currently lives in Seattle, home of the Space Needle, with her cat and two snakes. In her spare time, Hanneke enjoys exploring the Rocky Mountains, basking in nature and looking for dark skies to gaze at the cosmos.

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When a Mars Simulation Goes Wrong

A recent mission atop a Hawaiian volcano shows humans still have much to learn before they set foot on another world.

T he drive to the little white dome on the northern slope of Mauna Loa is a bumpy one. Mauna Loa, the “Long Mountain,” is a colossal volcano that covers half of the island of Hawaii. The rocky terrain, rusty brown and deep red, crunches beneath car tires and jostles passengers. Up there, more than 8,000 feet above sea level and many miles away from the sounds of civilization, it doesn’t feel like Earth. It feels like another planet. Like Mars.

For the past five years, small groups of people have made this drive and moved into the dome, known as a habitat. Their job is to pretend that they really are on Mars, and then spend months living like it. The goal, for the researchers who send them there, is to figure out how human beings would do on a mission to the real thing.

In February of this year, the latest batch of pioneers, a crew of four, made the journey up the mountain. They settled in for an eight-month stay. Four days later, one of them was taken away on a stretcher and hospitalized.

The remaining crew members were evacuated by mission support. All four eventually returned to the habitat, not to continue their mission, but to pack up their stuff. Their simulation was over for good. The little white dome has remained empty since, and the University of Hawaii, which runs the program, and NASA , which funds it, are investigating the incident that derailed the mission.

T he mission that began in February was the sixth iteration of the Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation, or HI-SEAS . The durations have varied, from four months to a full year, and participants come from all over the world and different fields.

H I-SEAS is a social experiment, and the participants are the lab rats. They wear devices to track their vitals, movements, and sleep, answer countless questionnaires about their own behavior and their interactions with others, and journal several times a week about their feelings.

Psychology researchers take all that data and use them to tease out information about what works and what doesn’t when you stick people in a tiny space they can’t escape. (Hint: They get on each other’s nerves—a lot—as documented in a recent podcast series, The Habitat . There’s also a little romance.)

Meanwhile, the crew members live as much as possible like they are on Mars. They eat freeze-dried food, use a composting toilet, take 30-second showers to conserve water, and never step outside without a space suit and helmet. They don’t communicate with anyone in real time, not even family. An email to mission support or their loved ones takes 20 minutes to get there. Receiving a response takes another 20 minutes. They’re not allowed to see anyone outside of the mission.

The habitat is a tight squeeze. The ground floor, which includes a kitchen, bathroom, a lab, and exercise spaces, measures 993 square feet. The second floor, where the bedrooms are, spans 424 square feet.

“You really do get the sense, when you’re going to sleep and you’re closing your eyes at night, that this could be a distant planet,” says Ross Lockwood, a physicist from Edmonton, Canada, and one of the members of mission two. “This could be Mars.”

But sometimes, Earth finds a way of sneaking in, of breaking the fuzzy boundary between simulation and reality.

Mission six arrived at the habitat on February 15. The crew waved goodbye to the researchers gathered outside the dome, felt the breeze on their faces for the last time for a long time, and piled in. The doors closed. Michaela Musilova, one of the crew members, described their first moments in an interview in April with The Cosmic Shed , a science podcast. (Musilova declined an interview with The Atlantic .)

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“Our commander cited part of [the 2011 novel] The Martian . I think it was the very first line of The Martian , like, ‘Oh, we’re fucked now,’ or something along those lines,” recalled Musilova, an astrobiologist from Slovakia. “And so we just gave each other a big hug and like, ‘Okay, we can do this.’”

The first few days were cloudy, which can be a problem on the volcano. The habitat and its systems run on a battery bank that is charged each day through a large solar array on the grounds. On cloudy or rainy days, it can be difficult for the batteries to bounce back. When this happens, the crew is supposed to suit up, go outside, and turn on a car-size backup generator that runs on propane.

“We really make it as primitive as some farm in Vermont,” says Bill Wiecking, the HI-SEAS tech-support lead and the energy-lab director at the Hawaii Preparatory Academy. Mission support receives text-message alerts when the habitat’s life-sustaining systems reach dangerous levels, but for the most part, it’s up to the crew to manage their use.

As stubborn clouds hung over the habitat, the crew tried to minimize their energy use. They dimmed most of the lights, kept kitchen appliances unplugged, and stayed off the treadmill.

On the morning of February 19, Lisa Stojanovski, a science communicator from Australia, woke up to find that the power in the habitat had gone out. “We must have used too much power, I guess,” she told me.

Stojanovski and another crew member initiated the procedures for leaving the habitat. They shimmied into their space suits, stepped outside, and headed for the backup propane generator, located nearby on the grounds. Stojanovski and her partner would flip a switch to bring the generator to life, while the two other crew members would flip a switch on a circuit breaker inside the habitat. This maneuver would shift the power source from the dead batteries over to the generator, Stojanovski said.

When it was done, Stojanovski came back inside. “I was elated that we were on track to solve the problem, and I was pretty bouncy and excited,” she said. “It was a little jarring at first, when the two crew members who were inside didn’t quite share the excitement. That was my first gut feeling that something was not quite right.”

One of the crew members was typing furiously at a computer. The other looked stricken, pale. They said they didn’t feel well.

They said they had sustained an electric shock.

Nothing like this had ever happened before inside the habitat. Kim Binsted, the HI-SEAS principal investigator and a professor at the University of Hawaii, told me that injuries during previous missions ranged from bruises and scrapes, acquired during treks across the rocky landscape, to “household accidents.” “The kinds of things that you can hurt yourself doing at home are also the kinds of things that you can hurt yourself doing at the hab,” Binsted said.

Stojanovski said she suspects the electric shock may have occurred because the crew member’s fingers brushed against live wiring. “In a regular household circuit breaker, you have a safety panel that covers all the live wiring that’s behind the switches,” Stojanovski said. “Unfortunately, our circuit breaker didn’t have one of those.”

The injured crew member was shivering. They lay down on the floor. The others covered them in blankets.

The crew placed several calls to the mission’s on-call doctor on an emergency cellphone in the habitat, which works in real time, but there was no answer.

The person designated as the crew commander then called 911 on the emergency line. The crew wasn’t supposed to have contact with people outside of the habitat. If first responders came to the dome, the simulation would be compromised. Stojanovski said the commander told her he wasn’t calling to summon an ambulance, but only to ask for medical advice. This took her aback. Stojanovski believed they needed an ambulance, and they needed it now.

The crew commander, Sukjin Han, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Texas at Austin from South Korea, told me he signed off on most of the important decisions during the mission, but that he made sure to “hear the thoughts and opinions of all crew members beforehand and reflect them in the decisions.” In the tense moments after the accident, Han went with the majority.

“The majority of the members—including the member who experienced the incident—decided that we [wanted] to ask for medical advice from 911, before asking for an ambulance. I don’t remember if Lisa had the same opinion but I do remember that she never objected to the plan,” Han said. “I have never thought and don’t think that maintaining the simulation is more important than the safety of the crew.”

During their training, HI-SEAS crew are told often that their well-being comes first. Safety is paramount. But so is maintaining the simulation. No one involved in HI-SEAS wants to jeopardize the data by breaking the sim, as they sometimes call it. They don’t want to give up before it’s over, either. Leaving the habitat would mean throwing away hours and hours of physical, social, and emotional investment. For participants who came from outside of the United States, it even means visa troubles.

“We all left our regular lives, quit our jobs in some cases, left our loved ones to go spend eight months doing this,” said Laura Lark, a software developer in New York who participated in mission five. “So we’re all pretty committed to getting high-quality data out of it.”

The thought of abandoning the simulation becomes more painful the longer the mission goes on. The crew members of mission six were faced with this dilemma just four days in. What if it were four months?

In one of the early missions, a crew member unwittingly turned on an internet access point that interfered with the HI-SEAS network, causing a communications blackout between the mountain and mission support. Wiecking had to go up the mountain to fix it, a move that could have jeopardized the integrity of the crew’s isolation. As Wiecking fiddled quietly with hardware a few feet from the dome, he could hear the voices of the crew through the tentlike walls. “That was so close to breaking the simulation, we had to have a big review over it,” he said.

During Lockwood’s mission, the second mission of the HI-SEAS project, a crew member decided to withdraw because of a chronic medical issue. “We struggled with the idea of what we would do if we really were on Mars,” Lockwood said. They decided to pretend that the crew member died. They imagined that they would leave his corpse out in the Martian atmosphere, where it would not decompose as it would on Earth , in the hopes of bringing it back to Earth for burial.

And they actually acted this all out. Lockwood said they had the departing crew member step into the vestibule that separates the habitat from the outside, the simulated “airlock.” The person stood there for five minutes, as they all would do before doing an extravehicular activity (EVA), and waited, pretending the airlock was depressurizing, evening out the pressure inside and outside, so they could safely exit. Then the crew member opened the door and walked outside, where mission support staff picked them up and took them down the mountain.

This time, in mission six, the danger was real. As the crew tried to figure out what to do, Stojanovski started to get worried about the injured crew member. “They were going downhill,” she said. “They had a tight chest and some pain behind the shoulder blades. I’m not a doctor or anything like that, but those kinds of symptoms freaked me out a little bit. I was pretty worried that they were going to have a heart attack or something.” The crew had received first-aid training, but the situation seemed to require more than that.

She called Binsted, the HI-SEAS principal investigator, and told her what happened. No one could reach the on-call doctor. Stojanovski said Binsted told the crew to call 911 again. This time, they asked for an ambulance.

“Throughout all our training, we’d been told, ‘Don’t worry, emergency services knows where you are, they know who you are, and they know how to get to you,’” Stojanovski said. “I was like, ‘My name’s Lisa, I’m from the HI-SEAS project, we would like an ambulance please, this is where we are.’ And they were like, ‘You’re from what project? Where are you located?’”

Stojanovski’s call to 911 had been picked up by Hawaii County dispatchers, but help would arrive from elsewhere.

The Pohakuloa Training Area is a U.S. Army base of several hundred people, located less than 15 miles from the habitat. Its jurisdiction stretches from Mauna Loa to Mauna Kea—and the HI-SEAS habitat sits nearly in the middle. Like the habitat, Pohakuloa is isolated from the rest of the world. The remoteness requires the military base to operate like a city, complete with a fire department and EMTs.

“We got the call that morning that there was a potential electrocution, that the individual was awake and conscious, but [they were] breathing heavily and [they] needed to be checked out,” says Eric Moller, the fire chief of the Pohakuloa Training Area, about the call from Hawaii County. “They were afraid about hypertension, elevated blood pressure.” The Army base dispatched an ambulance carrying four responders.

On a clear day, the drive from the base to the habitat takes 35 to 45 minutes. According to a response report from Pohakuloa obtained by The Atlantic , the drive took 43 minutes on February 19. Inside the habitat, the minutes seemed to drag like hours. At one point, Stojanovski said one of the responders called the habitat to say they were lost.

Moller said Pohakuloa’s fire captain phoned the habitat because responders were concerned about the conditions of the roads, which are unpaved, but they weren’t lost. When they reached a gate along the route to the habitat, they found that the lock was jammed. This added to their response time.

“Our guys go up and down that mountain all the time,” says Gregory Fleming, Pohakuloa’s deputy garrison commander, often to rescue lost hikers in flip-flops. And military staff know not to disturb their neighbors, the fake astronauts. They have been advised that any interaction risks wrecking their delicate reality.

When the crew finally heard tires grinding over rock outside, Stojanovski turned toward the exit, ready to greet the first responders. Han stopped her, she said, warning that whatever happened next would break the simulation. “I actually lost my temper at this point,” Stojanovski said. “I don’t remember exactly what I said, but there were some curse words involved.”

Han said he remembers Stojanovski moving quickly to the door. “I correctly remember that at least two of the members, including myself, called her name, almost simultaneously,” he said. “At least for myself, it was partly in order to calm her down, because she has suddenly become very emotional at that very moment, and give [her] at least one second to think about her reaction.”

Stojanovski could have ignored the others. H I-SEAS participants receive specific roles, like commander or communications specialist or health officer, but compliance is not compulsory as it would be, for example, in a military mission. “They have to fulfill those roles, but ultimately as they come together as a team, that’s something the crew have to figure out on their own,” says Joseph Gruber, the mission-support coordinator for HI-SEAS , and one of the people who regularly communicates with crews over email. “There’s structures in place and we give them guidelines on how best to do this, but it’s up to them. They’re the ones up there.”

Stojanovski decided to heed Han’s request. She didn’t go outside.

Stojanovski opened the door and waved the first responders into habitat. They loaded the injured crew member into the ambulance and checked their vitals. The ambulance drove down the volcano as far it could go; after about 20 miles, the vehicle neared the edge of Pohakuloa’s jurisdiction, a line the first responders aren’t allowed to cross. If they travel beyond this region, the reasoning goes, they leave the Pohakuloa residents at risk.

A hospital ambulance met the Pohakuloa ambulance at this edge, grabbed the crew member, and sped toward Hilo Medical Center, about 30 miles east of the habitat.

“It was really surreal when the ambulance drove away and there was kind of just silence,” Stojanovski recalled. “Like, wow, what just happened?”

B ack at their training base, a house in Kona, Stojanovski compiled a list of safety concerns about the habitat and sent it to Binsted, who confirmed she received it. Binsted wanted to continue the mission after getting approval from the university and NASA . Stojanovski said she did too, but only after mission support addressed her concerns and implemented some fixes.

Stojanovski sought some reassurance, but Binsted couldn’t make any guarantees, at least not before an investigation. “I kind of sat there and thought, You know what? I’m not okay with this ,” Stojanovski said. “I’m not okay with the culture and the attitude toward safety.” Now that she was off the mountain and out of the bubble, her perception of the mission changed. She decided to withdraw from it altogether.

Binsted, the principal investigator, said she could not discuss the specifics of the incident until the institutional review boards, one at the University of Hawaii and one at NASA , concluded their investigations and issued reports and recommendations.

Musilova, Han, and the fourth crew member, Calum Hervieu, an astrophysicist and systems engineer from Scotland, declined extensive interviews but provided The Atlantic with a joint statement, saying, in part, “We prefer not to discuss this topic with the media” until the University of Hawaii and NASA complete their reviews. They point to press releases from February , which say only that a crew member was hospitalized, treated at the hospital for a few hours, and then released.

Stojanovski said mission support was understanding and professional about her decision. Her fellow crew members were shocked and tried to persuade her to stay. If Stojanovski left, they all had to. H I-SEAS protocol prohibits a crew smaller than four, which produces fewer data for the researchers. There’s also the matter of maintaining the habitat and its various systems—power, water, food, the toilet—which requires several sets of hands.

They couldn’t replace Stojanovski with a backup, either; HI-SEAS missions are set up to investigate the evolution of one particular crew over time, and besides, finding someone willing to fly out to Hawaii for an eight-month mission on such short notice would be difficult.

Every HI-SEAS mission since the first one in 2013 has had a crew of six. Mission six started out that way, too, but two people were removed from the program, one of them just days before she said she was scheduled to fly from Australia to Hawaii. Binsted said she couldn’t comment on why mission six went ahead with four.

Brian Shiro, a geophysicist at the U.S. Geological Survey’s Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, who has worked on HI-SEAS since its inception, told me staff deliberated about whether to move forward with a smaller crew. “At any point along this timeline, there could have been a hard decision to delay the mission or cancel, but that’s not what they decided,” Shiro said. “I was on the side of the fence to delay. I didn’t want to start this mission because of the crew size. I said, ‘Guys, let’s find more people, let’s wait a few months at least.’ But I was overruled.”

He added: “This crew was very, very impressive, very professional, very motivated. But there were only four of them, and that left them vulnerable.”

During a real Mars mission, crew members will face a panoply of risks. People can, and probably will, get injured. They may die. Simulations like HI-SEAS attempt to forecast reactions to some of these threats, ranging from the things we cannot control, like the poisonous air outside, to those that we can only intuit, like the ideal way to organize a crew.

“We have things that we know we don’t know,” says Jenn Fogarty, the chief scientist at NASA ’s Human Research Program, the office that provides financial grants to HI-SEAS . “The ‘I don’t know what I don’t know’ is the scary space.”

Long before we send the first humans to Mars and keep them happy and healthy, we’ll have to figure out how to do that here—and it starts with deciding who should be on the mountain, which isn’t easy.

“You can select a crew all you want, get the right fit and mix, but there’s too many variables when it comes to human beings,” says Raphael Rose, the associate director of the Anxiety and Depression Research Center at UCLA, who was set to study stress management and resilience on mission six. “It’s just really hard to predict how we’re going to perform in all situations.”

M ission six arrived on Mauna Loa after the customary, rigorous application process that requires written essays, reference checks, Skype interviews, and, perhaps most important, the same kind of psychological screenings that NASA gives its astronauts. With each iteration of HI-SEAS , researchers and mission personnel learn a bit more about crew composition and what types of people work well together.

Steve Kozlowski, an organizational psychologist at Michigan State University who studies team effectiveness, says HI-SEAS finalists are scored on five personality traits, known in the field as the Big Five: extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness to experience. Kozlowski says they want conscientious people, but up to a point. Conscientiousness can veer toward passivity. Some degree of extroversion is valuable, until it’s too much. Outgoing people can morph into domineering people. In other words, it’s all about balance.

“There’s no magic formula,” Kozlowski says.

Psychological screenings can predict only so much. “Sometimes people look really good on paper and they might even interview well, but if there’s a big red flag on that screening, it gives one pause,” Shiro said. “There’ve been people we’ve ruled out because of that.”

During the mission, crews make regular trips outside of the habitat to explore the volcanic terrain in their space suits. To prepare them for this EVA, Shiro leads participants on excursions across the rugged landscape soon after they arrive in Hawaii. “Three days in the field in those conditions is a good way to get to know people,” he said. “There’s people that I think, Eh, I wonder how that one’s gonna do . Usually, that gut feeling, there’s something to it.”

A real mission to Mars would likely require crews to train together for months, maybe even years—far longer than the nine days of training that mission six had, Shiro said. Crew members would be put through a multitude of stressful situations to test their reactions. “You would tease out any red flags before you even left Earth,” Shiro said.

Shiro said one of his gut feelings kicked in during the fieldwork training for mission six. “There was this one person who was not as comfortable in the field,” he said. “That’s the sort of thing you don’t know until you get out there. Still did it, did all the training—a little slower, but did it all. But when the incident happened that ultimately led to the cancelation of the mission, that’s the person who quit. And it was not a surprise to any of us because we said, ‘Yeah, you know, she was a little more timid out there.’”

Stojanovski rebuffed Shiro’s assessment of her training. “I actually enjoyed being out in the field,” she said. “In fact, I was the first to volunteer to go outside on an emergency space walk on the morning of the incident.”

The HI-SEAS staff say the habitat is a safe environment.

“We’ve learned all the ways that you can kill yourself on Mars, and we’ve learned to prevent those things,” Wiecking says. “So it’s been very, very valuable, because it’s way better to do it here, where you can drive up and go, ‘Oh gosh, a water valve opened up and now you don’t have any water.’ Instead of on Mars, where it’s like, ‘You don’t have any water, you guys are gonna die in a couple of days.’”

Round-trip communication between Earth and Mars will take about 40 minutes. Astronauts won’t have the luxury of sitting around and waiting for commands or approval from Earth. H I-SEAS has mission support , rather than mission control , for that reason. The first astronauts on Mars will choose for themselves, for the most part, how they will live and work. In case of an emergency, they will need to decide what to do. And there’s no guarantee the astronauts won’t choose to take matters into their own hands.

“That’s the complexity of humans. They are going to do things on their own, maybe outside of the mission rules. They are going to try to make things work on their own, and they’re inventive and smart, and that’s the reason you picked this crew,” Fogarty says. “So thinking you can keep them in this tight little box of emotions is unrealistic.”

The potential cracks in the relationship between crew and mission support are already showing. Last year, when Hurricane Harvey struck Texas and forced the displacement of thousands, NASA staff decided to evacuate the members of a space simulation in Houston. For several weeks, a crew of four lives and works inside a cozy fake spaceship at the Johnson Space Center, pretending they’re coasting toward an asteroid.

“When we woke them up that Sunday morning and told them to pack up, that we were terminating the mission, they were not happy with us,” says Lisa Spence, the flight-analog project manager for the program, known as the Human Exploration Research Analog ( HERA ).

“One of them was pretty upset and not very complimentary and [asked us], ‘Why are you doing this? There’s no problem here, we want to continue.’ It wasn’t until the vehicle came and evacuated them and took them to the hotel, and they could see cars stranded all over the place, and boats that had been washed up onto the streets, and several feet of water across the roads—then they kind of appreciated why we stopped.”

The mission support at HERA had better information than the crew did, and because they sit in the same warehouse, just 20 feet away from the “spaceship,” they could make a decision for the crew. That won’t be possible on Mars. If the crew goes rogue, the people back on Earth might have no idea. Some degree of eavesdropping on the crew might be necessary, according to Sonja Schmer-Galunder, a researcher at Smart Information Flow Technologies, whose work on HI-SEAS was aimed at developing ways to predict the behavioral health of individuals and the team.

“I’m not the person to decide where the limits of their privacy are, and clearly you have to be able to withdraw and also have your private space. Is it ethical?” Schmer-Galunder says. “I mean, if people are signing up to go to Mars, I think everything should and must be done in order to bring the crew back safe. When you’re signing up for a Mars mission, you know that you’re giving yourself away in almost every aspect of your life. You become a tool that is being sent out there.”

T he HI-SEAS program is now on hold until the University of Hawaii and NASA complete their separate reviews. Fogarty, of NASA ’s Human Research Program, is supportive of Binsted and the project. Fogarty says it’s possible that the university and the space agency could come to different conclusions about the incident, which could determine the future of the HI-SEAS project.

“In the future, NASA may not participate in it if we don’t feel that our safety threshold for participants is met,” Fogarty says.

H I-SEAS , which is run mostly by volunteers, could continue on its own. But NASA ’s withdrawal would be detrimental to the agency, which doesn’t have any similar Mars simulations. The longest run of HERA , the asteroid analog, was just 45 days.

Stojanovski returned to Australia soon after the mission ended. She had resigned from a job on the communications team at Rocket Lab, a U.S. spaceflight company with a subsidiary based in New Zealand, after finding out she had been selected for the HI-SEAS program. When she withdrew from the mission, the job had already been filled. She worked at a fish market for a few months when she came home. She recently found another role at Rocket Lab, as an executive assistant, and moved to Auckland in May.

According to their personal websites, Musilova and Hervieu have found work at the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, located near the summit of Mauna Kea, less than 40 miles north of the habitat. “I’ve been saying c’est la vie quite a lot recently, and that’s really how it is,” Musilova said in the Cosmic Shed interview. “Life happens.” Han is still listed as a professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

Stojanovski has stayed in some touch with Binsted and Musilova. She hasn’t spoken with Hervieu or Han.

Several months removed from that February morning, Stojanovski said she wishes her crew’s panicked discussions had gone differently.

“I really regret that I followed orders that were not in the spirit of crew health and safety, just for the sake of keeping the mission within the simulation,” she said.

I asked Stojanovski whether she regrets withdrawing from the mission. She said it was a hard decision. But no, she doesn’t.

“In a way, I am kind of glad that this happened, because it’s been able to be a learning opportunity that exposes all the weak points in the system,” she said. “We can make the system strong so that people, when they do eventually get to Mars and they have a situation like this, they can be in a better position to tackle it. You’re increasing their chances of surviving something like this.”

Stojanovski remembers fondly the few days her crew had on the volcano before Earth came knocking on their door. It was cozy in that little white dome. One crew member had brought ping-pong paddles, so they cleared a table and started bouncing the ball back and forth, click, clack . Another came with an electronic keyboard and played classical compositions at night. Distinctly Earthly noises in a place that felt anything like home. They wafted around the habitat, pierced its thin walls, and drifted out into the silent expanse.

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Scientists Emerge From Dome After 8-Month Stay to Test Life on Mars

Six scientists who were living under a dome on the slopes of a dormant Hawaii volcano for eight months to simulate life on Mars have emerged from isolation.

The crew stepped outside the dome that's 8,000 feet up the slopes of Mauna Loa to feel fresh air on their skin Saturday. It was the first time they left without donning a spacesuit.

The scientists are part of a human performance study funded by NASA that tracked how they worked together as a team. They have been monitored by surveillance cameras, body-movement trackers and electronic surveys.

Crew member Jocelyn Dunn said it was awesome to feel the sensation of wind on her skin.

"When we first walked out the door, it was scary not to have a suit on," said Dunn, 27, a doctoral candidate at Purdue University. "We've been pretending for so long."

The dome's volcanic location, silence and its simulated airlock seal provided an atmosphere similar to space. Looking out the dome's porthole windows, all the scientists could see were lava fields and mountains, said University of Hawaii professor Kim Binsted, principal investigator for the study.

Six scientists exit a dome that they lived in as part of an isolated existence to simulate life on a mission to Mars on the Big Island of Hawaii, Saturday, June 13, 2015.

Tracking the crew members' emotions and performance in the isolated environment could help ground crews during future missions to determine if a crew member is becoming depressed or if the team is having communication problems.

Related: Simulated Mars Missions Play Role in Real-Life Dinosaur Discoveries

Spending eight months in a confined space with six people had its challenges, but crew members relieved stress doing team workouts and yoga. They were able to use a solar-powered treadmill and stationary bike, but only in the afternoons on sunny days.

"When you're having a good day, it's fine. It's fun. You have friends around to share in the enjoyment of a good day," Dunn said. "But if you have a bad day, it's really tough to be in a confined environment. You can't get out and go for a walk ... it's constantly witnessed by everyone."

The first thing crew members did when they emerged from the dome was to chow down on foods they've been craving — juicy watermelon, deviled eggs, peaches and croissants, a step up from the freeze-dried chili they had been eating.

Related: Glass Detected on Mars Could Hold Evidence of Life

Next on Dunn's list: going for a swim. Showers in the isolated environment were limited to six minutes per week, she said.

"To be able to just submerge myself in water for as long as I want, to feel the sun, will be amazing," Dunn said. "I feel like a ghost."

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Has Nasa found evidence of ancient life on Mars? An expert examines the latest discovery

Reader in Astrobiology, The University of Edinburgh

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Sean McMahon has received funding from Nasa.

The University of Edinburgh provides funding as a member of The Conversation UK.

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Nasa has announced the first detection of possible biosignatures in a rock on the surface of Mars. The rock contains the first martian organic matter to be decisively detected by the Perseverance rover , as well as curious discoloured spots that could indicate the past activity of microorganisms.

Ken Farley, project scientist on the mission, has called this “the most puzzling, complex, and potentially important rock yet investigated by Perseverance”.

Perseverance is part of Mars 2020, the first mission since Viking that is explicitly designed to seek life on Mars (officially, to “search for potential evidence of past life using observations regarding habitability and preservation as a guide”). Arguably, that objective has now been achieved: potential evidence for past life has been found. But much more work is needed to test this interpretation of the data. Here’s what we do know.

Since landing in Jezero crater a few years ago, Perseverance has traversed a series of rocks formed nearly four billion years before present. Mars back then was far more habitable than the cold, dry, toxic red planet of today.

There were thousands of rivers and lakes, a thick atmosphere, and comfortable temperatures and chemical conditions for life. Many of the rocks in Jezero are sedimentary: mud, silt and sand dumped by a river flowing into a lake.

The new discovery concerns one of these rocks. Informally named “Cheyava Falls” (a waterfall in Arizona), it is a small reddish block of what looks like a mudstone, enriched with organic molecules. The rock is also laced with parallel white veins. Between the veins are millimetre-scale whitish spots with dark rims. For an astrobiologist, all these features are intriguing. Let’s take them one-by-one.

First, “organic molecules” , are made of carbon and hydrogen (commonly with sulphur, oxygen or nitrogen as well). Examples include the proteins, fats, sugars, and nucleic acids from which all life as we know it is constructed.

Organic matter is common in rocks on Earth, most of it derived from the remains of ancient organisms. But the term “organic” is slightly misleading: such molecules can also be produced by non-biological reactions (in fact, we know this was happening four billion years ago on Mars).

Simple non-biological organic molecules are common in the universe, and Nasa’s Curiosity rover already found them in mudstones in Gale Crater. They were also reportedly detected by Perseverance in Jezero crater last year.

Nevertheless, Ken Farley considers the new observation the first truly “compelling detection” of organics made by Perseverance. Nasa has not told us which types of organic molecules are actually present in Cheyava Falls, so it is hard to evaluate their origins. They could turn out to be biological, but a full analysis using laboratories on Earth would be needed to settle this question.

Next, the veins. These are composed of calcium sulphate, which precipitated like limescale when liquid water ran along fractures in the subsurface. Veins like these are common in Martian sedimentary rocks (Curiosity saw plenty of them), and of course they are not “biosignatures” even though they normally represent habitable conditions.

My own work has shown that microorganisms inhabiting subsurface fractures can produce chemical fossils that get trapped in calcium sulphate veins. Strangely, however, the veins in Cheyava Falls also contain olivine, an igneous mineral. This might suggest that the water was injected at temperatures too high for life. We need more data to know one way or the other.

Finally, what about those whitish, discoloured spots? These look like the “reduction spots”, also called “leopard spots”, commonly seen in red sedimentary rocks on Earth. Such rocks are rusty-red because they contain an oxidised form of iron. When chemical reactions modify the iron to a less oxidised state, it becomes soluble. Water carries the pigment away leaving a bleached spot behind.

On Earth, these reactions are often driven by subsurface-dwelling bacteria. They use the oxidised iron as a source of energy, just as you and I use oxygen in the air. On Mars, bacteria-like organisms could have used the organic matter in the rock to complete the reaction (just as we use glucose from the food we eat).

Reduction spots haven’t been seen before on Mars, although bleached linear “halos” observed by Curiosity in Gale crater are somewhat similar. As one of the few astrobiologists to have studied reduction spots on Earth – and found evidence for biological processes within them – I am personally delighted. But as ever, caution is needed.

Potential non-biological causes need to be explored and ruled out. Iron-dissolving reactions can and do happen in sedimentary rocks without life. The dark margins of the Cheyava Falls spots are enriched in both iron and phosphate, an association previously suggested to occur around some calcium sulphate veins on Mars. This observation is consistent with life, but also with chemical reactions driven by acidic fluids.

The new findings will nevertheless embolden those calling on Nasa and the European Space Agency to proceed with the troubled multi-billion-dollar sample retrieval programme , which Perseverance was supposed to begin. The rover has now cored out a piece of the Cheyava Falls rock. If current plans are realised – a big if – then future spacecraft will collect this piece (and others) and bring it to Earth.

It will then be analysed in state-of-the-art laboratories far more capable than the instruments aboard Perseverance. Until that happens, we cannot be sure whether Perseverance has really found fossils of ancient life on Mars. The evidence so far is not definitive, but it is certainly tantalising.

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Scientists Will Live In A Dome For 8 Months To Simulate Life On Mars

January 19, 2017 / 4:14 PM MST / CBS Colorado

HONOLULU (AP) — Six carefully selected scientists will spend the next eight months living inside a man-made dome on a remote Hawaii volcano as part of a human behavior study that could help NASA as it draws up plans for sending astronauts on long missions to Mars.

The four men and two women were scheduled to move into their new simulated space home Thursday afternoon on Mauna Loa, settling into the vinyl-covered shelter of 1,200 square feet, or about the size of a small, two-bedroom home.

The NASA-funded project will study the psychological difficulties associated with living in isolated and confined conditions for an extended period.

NASA hopes to send humans to an asteroid in the 2020s and Mars by the 2030s.

The University of Hawaii operates the dome, called Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation, or HI-SEAS, and NASA has dedicated over $2 million to this stage of the project.

Scientists previously lived in the dome for two other long-term NASA-funded stays — one of them lasting a year, the other eight months — to study food requirements and crew cohesion.

The dome has small sleeping quarters for each member as well as a kitchen, laboratory, and bathroom. Unlike the Biosphere 2, it will be an opaque structure, not a see-through one, and it will not be airtight.

The participants will not be confined to the dome but will wear spacesuits whenever they step outside for geological expeditions, mapping studies or other tasks.

They will also wear instruments around their necks that measure their moods and proximity to other team members and will use virtual reality devices to simulate familiar and comforting surroundings and help them get through the mission.

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Nasa’s perseverance rover scientists find intriguing mars rock.

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NASA’s Perseverance rover discovered “leopard spots” on a reddish rock nicknamed “Cheyava Falls” in Mars’ Jezero Crater in July 2024. Scientists think the spots may indicate that, billions of years ago, the chemical reactions in this rock could have supported microbial life; other explanations are being considered.

The six-wheeled geologist found a fascinating rock that has some indications it may have hosted microbial life billions of years ago, but further research is needed.

A vein-filled rock is catching the eye of the science team of NASA’s Perseverance rover. Nicknamed “Cheyava Falls” by the team, the arrowhead-shaped rock contains fascinating traits that may bear on the question of whether Mars was home to microscopic life in the distant past.

Analysis by instruments aboard the rover indicates the rock possesses qualities that fit the definition of a possible indicator of ancient life. The rock exhibits chemical signatures and structures that could possibly have been formed by life billions of years ago when the area being explored by the rover contained running water. Other explanations for the observed features are being considered by the science team, and future research steps will be required to determine whether ancient life is a valid explanation.

The rock — the rover’s 22nd rock core sample — was collected on July 21, as the rover explored the northern edge of Neretva Vallis, an ancient river valley measuring a quarter-mile (400 meters) wide that was carved by water rushing into Jezero Crater long ago.

Mastcam Z views the Cheyava Falls Workspace

“We have designed the route for Perseverance to ensure that it goes to areas with the potential for interesting scientific samples,” said Nicola Fox, associate administrator, Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “This trip through the Neretva Vallis riverbed paid off as we found something we’ve never seen before, which will give our scientists so much to study.”

Multiple scans of Cheyava Falls by the rover’s SHERLOC (Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals) instrument indicate it contains organic compounds. While such carbon-based molecules are considered the building blocks of life, they also can be formed by non-biological processes.

“Cheyava Falls is the most puzzling, complex, and potentially important rock yet investigated by Perseverance,” said Ken Farley,Perseverance project scientist of Caltech in Pasadena. “On the one hand, we have our first compelling detection of organic material, distinctive colorful spots indicative of chemical reactions that microbial life could use as an energy source, and clear evidence that water — necessary for life — once passed through the rock. On the other hand, we have been unable to determine exactly how the rock formed and to what extent nearby rocks may have heated Cheyava Falls and contributed to these features.”

Perseverance views a 360 degree perspective of Bright Angel

Other details about the rock, which measures 3.2 feet by 2 feet (1 meter by 0.6 meters) and was named after a Grand Canyon waterfall, have intrigued the team, as well.

In its search for signs of ancient microbial life, the Perseverance mission has focused on rocks that may have been created or modified long ago by the presence of water. That’s why the team homed in on Cheyava Falls.

“This is the kind of key observation that SHERLOC was built for — to seek organic matter as it is an essential component of a search for past life,” said SHERLOC’s principal investigator Kevin Hand of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which manages the mission.

Running the length of the rock are large white calcium sulfate veins. Between those veins are bands of material whose reddish color suggests the presence of hematite, one of the minerals that gives Mars its distinctive rusty hue.

When Perseverance took a closer look at these red regions, it found dozens of irregularly shaped, millimeter-size off-white splotches, each ringed with black material, akin to leopard spots. Perseverance’s PIXL (Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry) instrument has determined these black halos contain both iron and phosphate.

graphic, astrobiologists catalog a seven-step scale,

“These spots are a big surprise,” said David Flannery, an astrobiologist and member of the Perseverance science team from the Queensland University of Technology in Australia. “On Earth, these types of features in rocks are often associated with the fossilized record of microbes living in the subsurface.”

Spotting of this type on sedimentary terrestrial rocks can occur when chemical reactions involving hematite turn the rock from red to white. Those reactions can also release iron and phosphate, possibly causing the black halos to form. Reactions of this type can be an energy source for microbes, explaining the association between such features and microbes in a terrestrial setting.

In one scenario the Perseverance science team is considering, Cheyava Falls was initially deposited as mud with organic compounds mixed in that eventually cemented into rock. Later, a second episode of fluid flow penetrated fissures in the rock, enabling mineral deposits that created the large white calcium sulfate veins seen today and resulting in the spots.

While both the organic matter and the leopard spots are of great interest, they aren’t the only aspects of the Cheyava Falls rock confounding the science team. They were surprised to find that these veins are filled with millimeter-size crystals of olivine, a mineral that forms from magma. The olivine might be related to rocks that were formed farther up the rim of the river valley and that may have been produced by crystallization of magma.

If so, the team has another question to answer: Could the olivine and sulfate have been introduced to the rock at uninhabitably high temperatures, creating an abiotic chemical reaction that resulted in the leopard spots?

“We have zapped that rock with lasers and X-rays and imaged it literally day and night from just about every angle imaginable,” said Farley. “Scientifically, Perseverance has nothing more to give. To fully understand what really happened in that Martian river valley at Jezero Crater billions of years ago, we’d want to bring the Cheyava Falls sample back to Earth, so it can be studied with the powerful instruments available in laboratories.”

A key objective of Perseverance’s mission on Mars is astrobiology , including caching samples that may contain signs of ancient microbial life. The rover will characterize the planet’s geology and past climate, to help pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet and as the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock and regolith.

NASA’s Mars Sample Return Program, in cooperation with ESA (European Space Agency), is designed to send spacecraft to Mars to collect these sealed samples from the surface and return them to Earth for in-depth analysis.

The Mars 2020 Perseverance mission is part of NASA’s Moon to Mars exploration approach, which includes Artemis missions to the Moon that will help prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is managed for the agency by Caltech, built and manages operations of the Perseverance rover.

For more about Perseverance:

science.nasa.gov/mission/mars-2020-perseverance

DC Agle Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. 818-393-9011 [email protected]

Karen Fox / Erin Morton Headquarters, Washington 202-358-1600 / 202-805-9393 [email protected] / [email protected]

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Astrobiology
Mars Sample Return (MSR)

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This Mars rock could show evidence of life. Here's what Perseverance rover found.

The Perseverance rover found a rock on Mars that scientists think could show evidence that life once existed on the Red Planet.

The rock – nicknamed "Cheyava Falls" after a waterfall in the Grand Canyon – has chemical markings that could be the trace of life forms that existed when water ran freely through the area long ago, according to a news release from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory .

"More than any of the other rocks that we have collected so far on Perseverance, this is a rock that may carry information on one of the key goals of the whole Perseverance mission," Ken Farley, a Perseverance project scientist with the California Institute of Technology, told USA TODAY. "That is – was there ever life on Mars in the very distant past?"

The first unique markings that scientists noticed on the rock's surface were a network of distinctive white veins. When Perseverance peered closer, it also found dozens of tiny, bright spots ringed with black.

The spots – found on rocks on the Earth – are particularly exciting to scientists because they show evidence of chemical reactions that release iron and phosphate, which can provide an energy source for microbes, a tiny form of life.

“On Earth, these types of features in rocks are often associated with fossilized record of microbes living in the subsurface," David Flannery, a Perseverance scientist from Queensland University of Technology, said in the news release.

More: NASA releases eye-popping, never-before-seen images of nebulae, galaxies in space

Perseverance investigates Martian river channel for signs of life

Perseverance found the rock, which measures more than 3 feet by 2 feet, on Sunday as it explored the Neretva Vallis , a quarter-mile-wide valley carved out by rushing water billions of years ago. Scientists have directed the rover to explore rocks that were shaped or changed by running water in the hopes of finding evidence of microbial life.

A scan of the rock using a special instrument on Perseverance's arm called SHERLOC picked up on organic matter. The rover then used another instrument , a "precision X-ray device powered by artificial intelligence," to examine the black rings on the rock.

Still, non-biological processes could also have formed the rock's unique features. Scientists want to bring the rock back to Earth so it can be studied in more detail to puzzle out how it formed.

Although the rock doesn't prove the past existence of life on Mars, it's exactly the kind of sample that the team was hoping to take home for further analysis.

"It's the kind of target that, if we're back in the laboratory, we could actually sort out a lot of these details and make progress on understanding what's going on," Farley said.

Although it's not clear exactly how the team will get the samples back to Earth, NASA has a plan in the works, Farley said. Perseverance "very likely will hand them off to a future mission that brings a rocket to the surface of Mars," he said.

Perseverance touched down on the Red Planet in February of 2021 after a journey through space of more than 200 days and 300 million miles. The rover's mission is to seek out signs of ancient life by examining rock and soil samples – Cheyava Falls was the 22nd rock sample it collected, according to NASA.

Scientists have come across what they thought was possible organic matter in the same area of Mars before, but the tools Perseverance used to uncover it this time are more accurate, Farley said.

"We're much more confident that this is organic matter than in the previous detection," he said.

Cybele Mayes-Osterman is a breaking news reporter for USA Today. Reach her on email at [email protected]. Follow her on X @CybeleMO.

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IMAGES

Scientists exit dome after yearlong Mars experiment
Life inside NASA's plastic dome that simulates life on Mars
Scientists emerge from Mars simulation dome on volcano slope
'Mars Mission' Crew Emerges From Yearlong Simulation In Hawaii
Mission Mars Hi-Seas Simulation in Pacific Domes Dome
Quadrocopter test in the UTIAS Mars Dome.

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