The subsequent time that Kelly Haston, Ross Brockwell, Nathan Jones and Anca Selariu will see blue sky, a 12 months can have passed by on Earth.
Not that the 4 “analog astronauts” are leaving the planet, but for the following 12 months they’ll live inside a mock Mars base situated at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, where they can be remotely observed and studied by scientists. As the primary of three planned Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog, or CHAPEA, crews, Haston, Brockwell, Jones and Selariu will help inform the space agency the right way to higher design and plan for future human missions on the actual Martian surface.
Mission 1 gets underway tonight (June 25) because the 4 volunteers enter the 1,700-square-foot (158 square meters) habitat, generally known as “Mars Dune Alpha,” at 7:30 p.m. EDT (2330 GMT). They’ll not leave the 3D-printed structure — apart from to conduct the occasional Mars-walk inside an adjoining 1,200-square-foot (111 square m), enclosed Mars “sandbox” — until July 7, 2024.
“To me, this is actually exciting, because one in all the things that is different than a few of our previous analogs at NASA is, people can be in isolation as a crew for 378 days,” Suzanne Bell, lead for NASA’s Behavioral Health and Performance Laboratory at Johnson Space Center, said in an interview with collectSPACE.com. “We also do analogs in something called HERA, the Human Exploration Research Analog, and our missions there have been 45 days. After which we collect data at other analogs, too, with various lengths, but this can be three, over one yearlong missions, which is a extremely great prolonged isolation.”
The crew was chosen to be “astronaut-like,” in keeping with Bell, with a requirement that they’ve a level in one in all the STEM (science, technology, engineering and arithmetic) fields, in addition to skilled experience of their chosen field, piloting experience or military training. In addition they needed to pass the identical physical and psychological testing as astronaut candidates to make sure they were fit for this system.
Haston, a research scientist studying human disease, is the mission’s commander. Brockwell, a structural engineer, is the crew’s flight engineer. Jones is the medical officer, pulling on his experience an emergency medicine physician, and Selariu, a microbiologist within the U.S. Navy, is science officer.
Selariu was originally chosen to be a backup crew member, but replaced Alyssa Shannon, a complicated practice nurse, prior to the mission starting. NASA didn’t provide an evidence for the change.
Haston, Brockwell, Jones and Selariu is not going to only need to survive living together for greater than a 12 months, but in addition adjust to a few of the same changes that a crew on Mars would face.
“What CHAPEA is actually about is Mars-realistic conditions by way of resource restrictions, so isolation confined with the living space being one in all them,” said Bell. “But we’re also restricting the crew to a spaceflight food system, time delayed communications, mission-relevant timelines, contingency situations and other resource restrictions.”
A mission control and safety console can be staffed in any respect times, but messages from Mars Dune Alpha will take 22 minutes to be received, the identical time it will take for a call from Mars to achieve Earth. And the crew can be eating freeze-dried, thermostablized and shelf-stable foods, but as they will not be simulating Martian gravity (38% of the surface gravity on Earth), they can be saved from using a special toilet.
The crew may also remain on Earth time, counting days (24 hours) moderately than sols (roughly 24 hours, 39 minutes, 35 seconds).
“My understanding of the research we have checked out to this point with the Mars sol is that expected impacts could be heavily on Mission Control,” Bell said, “while our focus for this particular analog is the impact on the crew and their human health and performance.”
Otherwise, the CHAPEA crew will live for the following 12 months as if they were really on Mars, participating in the identical sorts of activities that astronauts on the Red Planet would do. They can be instructed by Mission Control to perform science investigations, perform maintenance work on the habitat and maintain their fresh food crops.
They might also encounter periodic, unexpected problems to see how they react. What those additional “stressors” could be, Bell will not be saying.
“If I told you that, it would not be a surprise,” she told collectSPACE. “A variety of our focus is just with resource restrictions. So if people do not get to decide on what’s on their menu, how does that affect their health? Those are the kinds of things we’re focused on for this series of missions. That can be an important baseline for us to then proceed to explore all of those different possibilities of ours.”