NASA’s Mars Simulation Base To Welcome Its First Inhabitants To Live For A Year
By Nicole Rodrigues, 23 Apr 2023
Living on Mars is tricky business, and preparing to tackle life on the Red Planet is vital to ensuring safety. However, with no current way to even visit the planet, NASA has recreated its conditions here on Earth in a simulation base that will have future astronauts prepped and ready for life out in the cosmos.
The 3D-printed 1,700-square-foot compound is in a warehouse at the agency’s Johnson Space Center and will be home to four participants for a year. While it might seem cool to pretend to live on Mars for that long, none of the occupants will be able to leave the project early. So here’s to hoping they all get along with each other.
The crew NASA has hand-picked are a biomedical scientist, a board-certified physician, an advanced practice nurse, and a structural engineer. In addition, two extra backup members have also been added to the roster, namely a senior aerospace engineer and a US Navy microbiologist.
All data collected from the team will go towards the first stage of the Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog (CHAPEA), which focuses on how humans would survive on the Red Planet.
Given that not only Mars but space, in general, is not precisely filled with the comforts of living on Earth, the crew will be subjected to food and resource limitations, as well as other hurdles such as equipment failure and other “environmental stressors” to push them to their limits.
It might sound uncomfortable, but it is paramount that NASA explores every possible outcome to ensure that everyone is well prepared for the actual event. Though, that might not be for many years.
In addition to the realism, anytime any team wants to exit the habitat and into the wild mock-Mars “outdoors,” the crew members will have to put on a spacesuit and exit via an airlock.
Grace Douglas, the principal investigator of CHAPEA, says, “The simulation will allow us to collect cognitive and physical performance data to give us more insight into the potential impacts of long-duration missions to Mars on crew health and performance.”
[via Futurism and NASA, cover image via NASA/Bill Stafford]