NASA has offered a sneak peek inside its Mars simulation habitat where four volunteers have now spent 150 days isolated from the outside world.
By living within the confines of the 1,700-square-foot Mars Dune Alpha habitat at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Ross Elder, Ellen Ellis, Matthew Montgomery, and James Spicer are helping NASA to better prepare for long-duration missions that will take humans into deep space.
This week, the space agency shared several photos of the volunteers, who entered the habitat on October 19 last year.
CHAPEA hits the 150-day mark! 🎉
From harvesting crops to monitoring their physical and mental stressors, the crew of @NASA‘s yearlong Mars simulation is helping us to drill down how exactly humans will live and work in deep space. Scroll through for a peek inside their… pic.twitter.com/Yk4z94WiYu
Montgomery and Elder are shown carrying out some scientific research, and also playing table-tennis with Ellis on what looks like a regular-looking dining table. The fourth member of the group, Montgomery, doesn’t appear in the images, but we’ll assume that he’s doing just fine (thinking about it, he probably took the photos!).
NASA is carefully analyzing how the volunteers respond physically and mentally to spending so much time in a confined environment.
During their time in the Mars habitat, they’ll also have to deal with challenges like shortfalls in resources, along with maintenance tasks and daily activities like tending to crops.
“Because the crew is replicating living on the surface of Mars some 250 million miles away, communications with Earth can be delayed by approximately 22 minutes each way and may be entirely blocked,” Elder said prior to entering the habitat. “Because of this, we may be unable to expect input from Mission Control back in Houston when time-critical emergencies arise. Therefore, it’s critical for the crew to rely on our teamwork, skills, decision making, and quick action to ensure the safety and success of the mission.”
The facility has around nine rooms, a shared bathroom, and an area for communal meals and socializing. Each member has their own private bedroom, too.
There’s also an adjacent area that’s been designed to simulate the Martian surface, where the volunteers can practice so-called “Mars walks.”
Elder, Ellis, Montgomery, and Spicer are scheduled to leave the habitat on October 31 this year, giving NASA plenty more time to understand what it takes to survive while millions of miles from Earth.
NASA wants to send the first humans to Mars some time in the 2030s, but it’s possible that the epic voyage might not happen until much later. For the time being, the closest anyone will get to the red planet is right here on Earth, inside carefully controlled simulations like the one at the Johnson Space Center.
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.