All you want to know about NASA Human Isolation Mars Mission

NASA's year long Human Isolation Mars Mission 2015.

ABOUT

Six people shut themselves
inside a dome for a year in Hawaii on Friday, in the longest US isolation experiment aimed at helping Nasa prepare for a pioneering journey to Mars.

The crew includes a French
astrobiologist, a German physicist
and four Americans—a pilot, an
architect, a doctor/journalist and a
soil scientist.

They are based on a barren, Northern slope of Mauna Loa, living inside a dome that is 36ft (11m) in diameter and 20ft tall.
In a place with no animals and little
vegetation around, they closed
themselves in at 3.00pm Hawaii time, marking the official start to the 12- month mission.

COHABITATION

The men and women have their own small rooms, with space for a
sleeping cot and desk, and will spend their days eating food like powdered cheese and canned tuna, only going outside if dressed in a spacesuit, and having limited access to the Internet.

So what kind of person wants to
spend a year this way?
Crew member Sheyna Gifford
described the team as “six people who want to change the world by making it possible for people to leave it at will”, she wrote on her blog, LivefromMars.life.
Architect Tristan Bassingthwaighte
said he will be “studying
architectural methods for creating a more habitable environment and
increasing our capability to live in the extreme environments of Earth and other worlds”, according to his LinkedIn page.
“Hoping to learn a lot!” he added.

Any astronauts that go to Mars are
facing a trip that would last far longer than the six months that humans typically spend at the orbiting International Space Station.

Nasa’s current technology can send a robotic mission to the Red Planet in eight months, and the US space agency estimates that a human mission would take between one and three years.
With all that time spent in a cramped space without access to fresh air, food or privacy, conflicts are certain to occur.

HI SEAS

Nasa is studying how these scenarios play out on Earth—in a programme called Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS)— before pressing on toward Mars, which the space agency hopes to reach sometime in the 2030s.

The first HI-SEAS experiment
involved studies about cooking on
Mars and was followed by a four-
month and an eight-month
cohabitation mission.

COST

Nasa is spending $1.2 million on
these simulations and has just
received funding of another $1
million for three more in the coming years, according to principal investigator Kim Binsted.That is very cheap for space
research..