Four small rooms, a gym and lots of red sand – NASA on Tuesday unveiled its new Mars simulation habitat, where volunteers will live for a year to test what life will be like on future missions to Earth’s neighbor.
The facility, built for three planned experiments, called the Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog (CHAPEA), is located at the US space agency’s sprawling research base in Houston, Texas.
The four volunteers will begin the first trial this summer, during which NASA plans to monitor their physical and mental health to better understand human strength for such long periods of isolation.
With this data, NASA will better understand the “resource utilization” of astronauts on Mars, said Grace Douglas, principal investigator of the CHAPEA experiments.
“We can really start to understand how we’re supporting them with what we’re providing them, and that’s going to be really important information for making decisions about critical resources,” she said at a press tour of the facility. Such a distant mission comes with “very tight mass constraints,” she added.
Volunteers will live in a 1,700-square-foot (160-square-meter) house called “Mars Dune Alpha,” which includes two bathrooms, a vertical lettuce farm, a room dedicated to medical care, a relaxation area, and more work station.
NASA Mars Habitat
The transition chamber leads to an “outdoor” reconstruction of the Martian environment although still inside the hangar. Scattered around the red sand-covered floor are several pieces of equipment that astronauts would likely use, including a weather station, a brick-making machine, and a small greenhouse.
There is also a treadmill on which mock astronauts will walk suspended from straps to simulate the reduced gravity of the red planet.
The members of the first experimental team have not yet been named, but the agency said the selection “will adhere to NASA’s standard criteria for astronaut candidates,” with a strong emphasis on backgrounds in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
Researchers will regularly test the crew’s response to stressful situations, such as limited water availability or equipment failure.
The station has one more peculiarity: it was 3D printed
“This is one of the technologies that NASA is looking at as having the potential to build habitats on other planetary or lunar surfaces,” Douglas said. NASA is in the early stages of preparations for a mission to Mars, although most of the agency’s attention is focused on the upcoming Artemis missions, which aim to return humans to the moon for the first time in half a century.
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