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Volunteers who lived in a NASA-created Mars replica for over a year have emerged

Joe Hernandez

In this image made from video provided by NASA, CHAPEA commander Kelly Haston speaks in front of other crew members at Johnson Space Center in Houston on Saturday. NASA/AP hide caption

Four volunteers who spent more than a year living in a 1,700-square-foot space created by NASA to simulate the environment on Mars have emerged .

The members of the Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog mission — or CHAPEA — walked through the door of their habitat at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston on Saturday to a round of applause.

NASA is looking for volunteers to test its Mars simulator for a year

“Hello. It’s actually just so wonderful to be able to say hello to you all,” CHAPEA commander Kelly Haston said to the assembled crowd.

Haston and the other three crew members — Anca Selariu, Ross Brockwell and Nathan Jones — entered the 3D-printed Mars replica on June 25, 2023, as part of a NASA experiment to observe how humans would fare living on the Red Planet.

The volunteers grew their own vegetables, maintained equipment, participated in so-called Marswalks and faced stressors that actual space travelers to Mars could experience, including 22-minute communication delays with Earth.

The 378-day endeavor was the first of three NASA missions the space agency has planned to test how humans would respond to the conditions and challenges of living on Mars, where it says it could send astronauts as soon as the 2030s. NASA’s second CHAPEA mission is scheduled for the spring of 2025, and the third is slated to begin in 2026.

Why NASA wants human guinea pigs to test out Martian living

After emerging from isolation on Saturday, CHAPEA science officer Anca Selariu reflected on why she and others chose to dedicate themselves to this particular effort.

“I’ve been asked many times: Why the obsession with Mars? Why go to Mars?” Selariu said. "Because it’s possible. Because space can unite and bring out the best in us. Because it’s one defining step that Earthlings will take to light the way into the next centuries.”

NASA has conducted other isolation experiments before, including simulated journeys through space of roughly 30 days and underwater missions lasting up to three weeks at a time.

Watch CBS News

4 volunteers just entered a virtual "Mars" made by NASA. They won't come back for one year.

By Emily Mae Czachor

June 26, 2023 / 11:50 AM EDT / CBS News

Four volunteers entered a simulated Mars habitat on Sunday, where they are expected to remain for 378 days while facing a range of challenges designed to anticipate a real-life human mission to the red planet. 

The participants — research scientist Kelly Haston, structural engineer Ross Brockwell, emergency medicine physician Nathan Jones and U.S. Navy microbiologist Anca Selariu — were selected from a pool of applicants to be part of NASA's Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog, or CHAPEA, in its first yearlong mission. None of them are trained astronauts.

"Thank you all for your dedication to exploration," said Grace Douglas, the mission's principal investigator at NASA, during a briefing  Sunday before they entered the habitat. "Our best wishes go with you."

Haston, designated by NASA as the commander of the simulated Mars mission, shared emotional remarks at the briefing about the importance of spaceflight and exploration, which she said "exemplifies some of the best qualities of humankind." Haston also praised fellow crew members, calling them an "amazing group of dedicated individuals who feel very passionate about space exploration and science."

"The crew has worked so hard this month to get ready for this mission," Haston said. "It has been very special to be a part of such a tremendous group of scientists and specialists from a diverse set of backgrounds working together to bring CHAPEA 1, the first of three missions, to reality."

Haston, Brockwell, Jones and Selariu will spend more than a year living and working in a simulated Mars environment built at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. 

During their time inside of the 3D-printed, 1,700-square-foot habitat, the crew is set to carry out an array of "mission activities," including simulated spacewalks, robotic operations, growing of crops, habitat maintenance, personal hygiene and exercise, according to NASA . At 1,700 square feet, the habitat is smaller than the average U.S. single-family house. It includes a kitchen, private crew quarters and two bathrooms, along with medical, work and recreation areas.

They crew will also face a series of obstacles that likely mirror those of a true Mars mission, as researchers simulate conditions like resource limitations, equipment failure, communication delays and environmental stressors, NASA said in a news release when it introduced the crew members in April.

"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," Douglas said at that time. "Ultimately, this information will help NASA make informed decisions to design and plan for a successful human mission to Mars."

The simulated mission is the first of three planned Mars surface simulations, each of which is expected to last one year. NASA says the information collected and studied over the course of these missions, along with ongoing exploration happening on and around the moon, will help send the first astronauts to Mars in the future.

Emily Mae Czachor is a reporter and news editor at CBSNews.com. She covers breaking news, often focusing on crime and extreme weather. Emily Mae has previously written for outlets including the Los Angeles Times, BuzzFeed and Newsweek.

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NASA’s Yearlong Mars Simulation Is a Test of Mental Mettle

On June 25, four crew members will suit up and embark on a Mars mission, living for an entire year in a  small 3D-printed habitat with only each other for company. But these space explorers won’t leave Earth. Their simulated Martian environment is contained in a large hangar at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, and it’s designed to test the psychological and social challenges that will confront early visitors to the Red Planet, where remoteness and the harsh terrain will  make life formidable . 

The program is called Chapea, which stands for  Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog . NASA hopes that lessons from this unique social experiment could aid future astronauts when they really do set foot on the ruddy Martian dirt—such as learning how the space agency can make the crew comfortable and help them get along with each other, or deal with loneliness or homesickness. “If we get to the end of the year and the crew is complete and we haven’t had any attrition, that would be, for me, a huge thing. It sounds doable, but it actually will be very hard,” says Kelly Haston, the mission’s biomedical researcher and commander. “We know we can actually leave. We’re volunteers, so there is an exit sign. On Mars you won’t have that.” 

Just like the first batch of Martian astronauts, Haston and her crewmates—Ross Brockwell, Nathan Jones, and Alyssa Shannon—will live in a cramped space without contact with other people. They’ll be able to communicate with mission control, but with a 20-minute delay, as if they were in fact some 100 million miles away from home. Like real visitors to Mars, they’ll see only a stark, lifeless landscape, which  NASA is simulating with an enclosed space covered with Martian mural images and a 1,200-square-foot sandbox filled with red sand. Each week, they will have multiple opportunities to go outside for “Mars walks”—while wearing spacesuits. 

The 1,700-square-foot structure they’ll live in has been  3D-printed using a simulated Martian regolith to mimic NASA’s plans for future missions. It has Ikea-like furniture, clean spaces, and bright lighting, like a high-end hostel for space workers. The habitat includes small individual crew quarters, a communal space with a table for team dinners and meetings, chairs and a couch, a work area, a kitchen, two bathrooms, and an exercise room. And that’s about it. “The objective of the Chapea mission is to collect data on the crew’s health and performance while they are living in a realistically restricted environment and living the lifestyle that could be expected of Mars astronauts,” says deputy project manager Raina MacLeod.

While the idea of throwing four people into a single structure for a long time and seeing how they fare sounds kind of like  a reality TV show , the crew will be disciplined, and they’ll have tasks to complete. In many ways, their day-to-day life will be similar to that of  astronauts aboard the International Space Station , just with a bit more space and no floating. (People will feel lighter and bouncier on Mars, which is smaller and less massive than Earth, but that’s hard to simulate.) During the crew’s work hours, they’ll conduct mission operations, like the “Mars walks,” growing plants, getting exercise, cleaning the habitat, and maintaining equipment. The kitchen’s equipped with a small oven and a fridge, and they’ll have to rely on reconstituted dehydrated food between limited batches of fresh food delivered by infrequent cargo resupply missions. Their bathrooms have a shower, toilet, and sink with running water—a  big improvement over life in microgravity—though the water for each crew member will be rationed, as there will be very  limited water available on Mars .

NASA will be monitoring the Chapea crew using cameras posted inside the habitat, and someone will be available to them 24/7 at mission control. Like astronauts in Earth orbit, the crew will have private conferences with medical professionals to keep tabs on their mental and physical health, and those will be the only communications not subject to the usual time delay. They will also fill out surveys regarding their mood and temperament. The crew will be able to stay in touch with friends and family—but while they can send and receive video messages and emails, real-time conversations with them will be impossible.

While the accommodations look nice, the relative isolation might affect crew members over time, and it’s important to see how they fare. “NASA is right to study this, because what we’ve learned is that social isolation is a very dangerous psychological toxin,” says Craig Haney, a UC Santa Cruz psychologist who researches  solitary confinement . Haney has documented the debilitating and sometimes permanent effects of isolation on prisoners—effects that can emerge in just a couple weeks. The situations aren’t the same, of course: While the Chapea bedrooms are similar in size to a solitary confinement cell, the crew also has other spaces for activities—and they have each other. They’ll still be more isolated than normal, however, like many of us were during the early days of Covid-19. During Covid “we’ve been denied the normal social interactions that we’ve learned to depend on. For many people, it’s proven to be extremely stressful, and it has generated forms of psychological maladies that were unanticipated at the outset of the pandemic,” he says.

With the Mars simulation, Haney suggests that NASA should watch the crew for danger signs, like symptoms of depression, heightened irritability, and moodiness, and changes in sleeping and eating patterns. And for the crew, he recommends creating routines, including social rituals, and trying to reach out to the outside world, not just to NASA’s mission control, to lessen the feelings of isolation.

For her part, Haston plans to bring along videos of familiar places and audio recordings of sounds and music that have meaning for her, anticipating the unsettling lack of sound in the simulated Mars environment. She also plans on using meditation to deal with anxiety. 

Chapea builds on previous Mars-like experiments, including the  NASA-funded Hi-SEAS simulation on the northern slope of the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii. Hi-SEAS ran six experiments between 2013 and 2018, with the last one  aborted after just four days when a crew member had to be taken to a hospital after suffering an electric shock. 

Kate Greene, author of  Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars, was in the first Hi-SEAS crew, which lived in the habitat for four months. (One of her crewmates was Sian Proctor, a geoscientist and artist who later flew in orbit on  SpaceX’s Inspiration4 .) Greene thinks these programs are useful. “What makes them worthwhile is thoughtful experimental design,” she says. “I think it is of the utmost importance to consider the human factors involved in a long-duration space mission. As Kim Binsted, the head of Hi-SEAS, often said, ‘If something goes wrong psychologically or sociologically with the crew, it can be as disastrous as if a rocket exploded.’”

Ashley Kowalski, who served on an eight-month US-Russian Mars simulation called SIRIUS-21, says they are also good for helping future crews psychologically prepare in advance. “Until you’re in that type of environment, you don’t really know how you’ll react to issues and situations that come up,” she says.

Ultimately, a real Mars mission will be much tougher than any simulation on Earth. Those astronauts will have to worry about threats like  space radiation , the  health effects of microgravity , and running out of water, food,  power , and breathable air. And unlike the Chapea volunteers, if they get sick of their crewmates, they can’t just quit. 

But Haston points out the positive side of this unique situation too. “There’s the negative people bring up: ‘You’re going to be four people getting on each other’s nerves.’ But we’re also going to become a tremendous unit that can do things and understand each other in a way that most people don’t have in their workplace,” she says. “You’ll be so dependent on each other, and also so close to each other. Seeing that outcome will be amazing.”

Update 6-5-2023 7:00 PM: This story was updated to correct the nationalities of the agencies that ran the SIRIUS-21 program.

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Mars 2020: Perseverance Rover

Science instruments.

Perseverance’s science instruments are state-of-the-art tools designed to acquire information about Martian geology, atmosphere, environmental conditions, and potential biosignatures.

The Mastcam-Z is the name of the mast-mounted camera system that is equipped with a zoom function on the Perseverance rover. Mastcam-Z has cameras that can zoom in, focus, and take 3D pictures and video at high speed to allow detailed examination of distant objects.

The SuperCam on the Perseverance rover examines rocks and soils with a camera, laser, and spectrometers to seek chemical materials that could be related to past life on Mars. It can identify the chemical and mineral makeup of areas on Mars as small as a pencil point, from a distance of more than 20 feet (7 meters). This instrument also has a significant contribution from the Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales, Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planétologie (CNES/IRAP) France.

Spectrometer

Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals

Mounted on the rover's robotic arm, SHERLOC uses cameras, spectrometers, and a laser to search for organics and minerals that have been altered by watery environments and may be signs of past microbial life. In addition to its black-and-white context camera, SHERLOC is assisted by WATSON, a color camera for taking close-up images of rock grains and surface textures.

Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry (PIXL)

The Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry is called PIXL. PIXL has a tool called an X-ray spectrometer. It identifies chemical elements at a tiny scale. PIXL also has a camera that takes super close-up pictures of rock and soil textures. It can see features as small as a grain of salt! Together, this information helps scientists look for signs of past microbial life on Mars.

Environmental Sensors

Mars environmental dynamics analyzer (meda).

The Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer is known as MEDA. It makes weather measurements including wind speed and direction, temperature and humidity, and also measures the amount and size of dust particles in the Martian atmosphere.

Mars Oxygen ISRU Experiment (MOXIE)

The Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment, or MOXIE, is helping NASA prepare for human exploration of Mars. MOXIE tested a way for future explorers to produce oxygen from the Martian atmosphere for burning fuel and breathing.

Radar Imager for Mars' Subsurface Experiment (RIMFAX)

RIMFAX uses radar waves to probe the ground under the rover.

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Simulated Human Spaceflight to Mars

Start your flight to Mars

Scientists have not yet determined whether there is life on Mars. They have also never been there to find out. A roundtrip flight to the Red Planet would take about two years. Would a human be able to withstand such a challenge? This question has constantly been on our minds, and now a manned mission to Mars is not science fiction any more.

The Mars-500 experiment, in which 6 volunteers will stay in a confined simulated spacecraft for about 500 days, will provide an answer to this question. To experience what the flight to Mars is like, visit the new Google project. You'll be able to watch detailed video reports about Mars-500 and take a virtual tour of Mars. Walk along the Valles Marineris canyons, climb the Olympus Mons, take a peek into the Gusev crater or climb down into one of Mars' lakes.

Renowned Russian Science Fiction writers including Sergey Lukyanenko, Alexander Gromov, Dmitry Kolodan and others will be composing a novel about the experience during the simulation. Each week, one of them will add a chapter to the novel. Read and dream with us!