As many of us experienced during lockdowns, it’s not easy to stay sane and productive in an enclosed environment. But four volunteers for a NASA experiment have tested this to its limits by spending more than a year confined to a simulation of a Mars outpost.
In NASA’s Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog (CHAPEA) mission, four volunteers have spent 378 days in a simulated Mars environment designed to look and feel as much like Mars as is possible here on Earth. They lived in a 3D-printed habitat, performed science jobs, and could only communicate with the outside world via ground control.
“For more than a year, the crew simulated Mars mission operations, including ‘Marswalks,’” grew and harvested several vegetables to supplement their shelf-stable food, maintained their equipment and habitat, and operated under additional stressors a Mars crew will experience, including communication delays with Earth, resource limitations, and isolation,” NASA explained in a statement.
The idea was to test what some of the health implications were for crew members on long-duration missions. With a limited diet and some high exercise demands — such as performing simulated Marswalks using a treadmill where they had to walk for long periods — researchers wanted to check the effects of these conditions on their physical health. Plus, there was also the important issue of group psychology and mental health during such a long period of relative isolation.
Now that this phase of the experiment has come to an end, the crew is getting ready to leave their habitat for the first time in a year. They will be exiting the simulated Mars environment this Saturday, July 6.
If you’re curious to see what it’s like to leave an enclosed environment after more than a year, NASA will be live-streaming the crew members as they leave their habitat on Saturday, July 6. The coverage will include a ceremony to welcome the crew back to “Earth” life, plus discussions with NASA experts about the experiment and its potential for future Mars missions. Panelists include Kjell Lindgren, a NASA astronaut and deputy director of flight operations, plus several scientists and engineers who worked on the mission.
Coverage begins at 5 p.m. ET/2 p.m. PT on July 6 , and you can watch either on NASA’s streaming service NASA+ or via YouTube by heading to the YouTube page for the event or by using the video embedded above.
After 13 suborbital test flights and more than $15 billion in development costs, SpaceX's Starship has finally reached orbit. The 407-foot megarocket, the most powerful ever built, lifted off from Starbase, Texas, on Monday and delivered its first real payload on it's 14th attempt. The celebration came with an asterisk, though, since SpaceX had to cut the planned 10-hour mission to roughly three hours.
https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/2104601695711904180
SpaceX is finally ready to give Starship its biggest test yet. The company says the massive rocket's 14th test flight is scheduled for September 22, when it will attempt to put the upper stage into Earth orbit for the first time. The launch is currently pending regulatory approval, with a 75-minute window opening at 7:15 a.m. CT.
Starship has 26 Starlink satellites to deliver
For decades, humanity has looked up at the Moon and wondered what it would be like to live on it. Think sprawling cities, factories, research centers, and permanent human settlements. Unfortunately, there is one fairly fundamental problem with that vision.
A new study published in Frontiers in Space Technologies argues that even the Moon's potentially enormous reserves of frozen water may be nowhere near enough to support city-sized populations sustainably. Researchers Martin Elvis and Jonathan McDowell estimate that the permanently shadowed regions near the lunar poles could contain roughly one billion tons of water. It sounds like an extraordinary amount until you put a million thirsty humans next to it.