REAL LIFE NEWS: A YEAR IN ISOLATION IN A MARS SIMULATION
by Hazed
NASA has just locked six people up for a year. No, it’s not prison, it’s the latest attempt to simulate the conditions a mission to Mars would endure.
The team consists of a French astrobiologist, a German physicist and four Americans – a pilot, an architect, a journalist and a soil scientist. (This sounds like the start of a very long-winded joke... a Frenchman, a German and four Americans walked into a dome...)
The team have begun living in a dome near a barren volcano on Hawaii. They will live in close quarters, without fresh air, fresh food or privacy. If they leave the dome they will have to wear a spacesuit. Their provisions will include powdered cheese and canned tuna. You can see pictures of the team as they enter their confinement at the source link below.
This is the longest simulation NASA has ever conducted, the previous longest being eight months. By contrast, ISS missions normally last six months.
The focus of isolation experiments such as this is to see how humans cope with living in tight quarters.
“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,” said Kim Binsted, a Nasa investigator.
It sounds like perfect hell to me – I don’t like enclosed spaces and I like to have time alone. I guess I’m never going to Mars in real life until such time as they invent a teleporter.
