Mock Mars Mission Is Longest US Space Mission Simulation

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Six astronaut-like crew members have embarked on the longest dedicated space travel simulation ever conducted on U.S. soil. The Hawai‘i Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS) team members closed the door to their "Mars habitat" and shut out the rest of life on Earth for eight months.

I n preparation for a manned mission to Mars by 2030, NASA has a six member team for a staying eight months in a dome-shaped building on a Hawaiian volcano.

The HI-SEAS (Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation) project is a part of a study financed by NASA to examine crew interactions and sustainable living on a Hawaiian volcano.

The project aims to check how well people who are secluded can coordinate to work together coherently and find out their requirements to survive on the Red Planet.

“Right now, the psychological risks are still not completely understood and not completely corrected for,” said chief investigator for the project, Kimberly Binsted, Information and computer science professor from the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

“NASA is not going to go until we solve this.”

How do you select and support astronauts for a mission that will last two to three years in a way that will keep them healthy and performing well?” Binsted said.

"It’s analogous to Mars but translates well to any situation that requires teamwork and a reliance on technology."

An estimate states that on their way to Mars, the astronauts will invest at least 6 months to reach to the planet and another six months while coming back home. This means a total of 12 months travelling apart from about 500 days stay on the red planet.

The team stepped into the 36-foot dome-shaped building on Mauna Loa volcano, the second biggest volcano in the solar system on October 15.

“It’s a very pared-down existence in space. You can only use the energy from the sun, the water that you bring with you, the food that you grow,”Martha Lenio, the leader of the group and a renewable energy entrepreneur said.

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“On Earth it is so large and forgiving we forget that we have to live within our limits. And that’s where I see the crossover between space and applications on Earth: if we can live like this in our space station it might be easier to do it on Earth.”

"It’s analogous to Mars but translates well to any situation that requires teamwork and a reliance on technology,” said team member Jocelyn Dunn, a doctoral student at Purdue University.

The finalists for the project were picked in a six-day camping trip in the Rocky Mountains that established their survivalist skills and team work.

Previously as a part of mock missions Russia also conducted the same in 2010 and 2011 that lasted for about 520 days, which is analogous to the actual mission to the Red Planet. As time passed four of the six developed sleep disorders and became less productive.

In the Hawaiian mission a sent email will take 20 minutes to get to the sender and another 20 minutes for the reply to reach back to the person in the dome, a setup similar to actual lag for communications on Mars.

Other crew members included Allen Mirkadyrov, 35, a NASA aerospace engineer; Sophie Milam, 26, a graduate student at the University of Idaho; and Zak Wilson, 28, a mechanical engineer who worked on military drone aircraft at General Atomics in San Diego.


SOURCE  Capital OTC

By 33rd Square

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