Six people shut themselves inside a dome for a year in Hawaii on
Friday, in the longest US isolation experiment aimed at helping Nasa
prepare for a pioneering journey to Mars.
The crew includes a
French astrobiologist, a German physicist and four Americans - a pilot,
an architect, a doctor/journalist and a soil scientist.
They are based on a barren, northern slope of Mauna Loa, living inside a dome that is 11m in diameter and 6m tall.
In
a place with no animals and little vegetation around, they closed
themselves in at 15:00 Hawaii time (01:00 GMT on Saturday), marking the
official start to the 12-month mission.
The
men and women have their own small rooms, with space for a sleeping cot
and desk, and will spend their days eating food like powdered cheese
and canned tuna, only going outside if dressed in a spacesuit, and
having limited access to the internet.
So what kind of person wants to spend a year this way?
Crew
member Sheyna Gifford described the team as "six people who want to
change the world by making it possible for people to leave it at will",
she wrote on her blog, LivefromMars.life.
Architect Tristan
Bassingthwaighte said he will be "studying architectural methods for
creating a more habitable environment and increasing our capability to
live in the extreme environments of Earth and other worlds", according
to his LinkedIn page.
"Hoping to learn a lot!" he added.
Pioneer troubles
Any
astronauts that go to Mars are facing a trip that would last far longer
than the six months that humans typically spend at the orbiting
International Space Station.
Nasa's current technology can
send a robotic mission to the Red Planet in eight months, and the space
agency estimates that a human mission would take between one and three
years.
With all that time spent in a cramped space without access to fresh air, food, or privacy, conflicts are certain to occur.
The
US space agency is studying how these scenarios play out on Earth - in a
program called Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS)
- before pressing on toward Mars, which Nasa hopes to reach sometime in
the 2030s.
The first HI-SEAS experiment involved studies about
cooking on Mars and was followed by a four-month and an eight-month
co-habitation mission.
Nasa is spending $1.2m on these
simulations and has just received funding of another $1m for three more
in the coming years, according to principal investigator Kim Binsted.
"That is very cheap for space research," she told AFP by phone from Hawaii.
"It is really inexpensive compared to the cost of a space mission going wrong."
Other
simulation experiments have taken place under the ocean off the Florida
coast, in Antarctica and in Russia, where a 520-day Mars experiment was
carried out in 2011.
Conflict resolution
Binsted said that during the eight-month co-habitation mission, which ended earlier this year, conflicts did arise.
She said she could not go into detail about the nature of them without breaching confidentiality of the crew.
But the crew was able to work through their problems, she said.
"I
think one of the lessons is that you really can't prevent interpersonal
conflicts. It is going to happen over these long-duration missions,
even with the very best people," she told AFP.
"But what you can
do is help people be resilient so they respond well to the problems and
can resolve them and continue to perform well as a team."
Binsted said the first scientific results from the missions should be made public about a year from now.
Jocelyn
Dunn, a crew member from the previous mission, said she came to love
the inside jokes among the crew, doing daily workouts, and learning to
cook things like bagels and pizza dough with the ingredients on hand.
"I guess I got a taste of marriage, albeit a hexagon of relationships rather than a dyad," she wrote on her blog.
Then,
just days after the mission ended in mid-June, she described the joy of
being "on Earth" again, eating fresh vegetables, using a knife to cut
meat, swimming, and drinking soda and champagne.
"I couldn't believe how much I had missed the flavours and textures of a juicy steak."
Saturday, August 29, 2015
A year and counting: Mars isolation experiment begins
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