mars experiment hawaii

Scientists Just Emerged From a Year in Isolation After an Epic NASA-Funded Mars Simulation

The longest-running NASA experiment of its kind designed to simulate living conditions on Mars has come to an end, with six volunteers emerging from a year-long stay in a sealed dome in Hawaii.

For 365 days , the HI-SEAS (Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation) crew lived in isolation in a geodesic dome on the barren slopes of the Big Island's Mauna Loa, with the rocky, sparse terrain outside chosen for its similarity to the red planet's natural environment.

During the year, the team members could only leave their sealed habitat wearing space suits, and their only contact with the outside world came in the form of emails – which were delayed for 20 minutes either way, so as to emulate how long actual emails would take to send between Earth and Mars.

The experiment – funded by NASA and run by the University of Hawaii – is the longest yet in a series of ongoing HI-SEAS simulations designed to see how scientists cope with the extreme, long-term isolation that would have to be endured by astronauts and researchers during a real-life Mars mission.

While previous jaunts have seen scientists enclosed in the habitat for up to eight months, this team set a new NASA record by lasting an entire year.

But they're nowhere near the effort of Europe and China's Mars–500 team , who participated in a similar experiment between 2007 and 2011, and managed to last a staggering 520 days in a Mars simulation.

The tone from the latest HI-SEAS crew is upbeat and optimistic, suggesting that the emotional and technical rigours of a long-term stay in a sealed-off space dome are not unviable for future travellers to the red planet.

"I can give you my personal impression which is that a mission to Mars in the close future is realistic," said one of the team, French astrobiologist Cyprien Verseux . "I think the technological and psychological obstacles can be overcome."

In addition to Verseux, the crew consisted of a physicist, an architect, a soil scientist, a neuroscientist, and an engineer.

This bunch not only had to contend with being isolated from the rest of humanity, but also with having to live in such close proximity to each other in extremely confined quarters – the dome measures just 11 by 6 metres (36 by 20 feet).

"It is kind of like having roommates that just are always there and you can never escape them," mission commander Carmel Johnston told media this week, "so I'm sure some people can imagine what that is like, and if you can't then just imagine never being able to get away from anybody."

Everything the crew survived on during their year 'on Mars' they had to bring with them, meaning they essentially ate a lot of things like powdered food and canned tuna.

In addition to serving as guinea pigs so we can better understand the psychological effects of spending so long in a sealed environment, the researchers also ran a number of experiments, such as examining how to extract water from arid terrain, which could end up meaning the difference between life and death on Mars.

"Showing that it works, you can actually get water from the ground that is seemingly dry," said German researcher Christiane Heinicke . "It would work on Mars and the implication is that you would be able to get water on Mars from this little greenhouse construct."

But the biggest challenge was staving off boredom, with the team having to devise ways of keeping themselves entertained, such as learning salsa dancing and playing the ukulele.

"We were always in the same place, always with the same people," Verseux said .

His advice to new volunteers who will take part in new long-term HI-SEAS isolation experiments beginning in 2017 and 2018? "Bring books."

The team is now being debriefed, and research looking at how well they fared psychologically during their 12 months of isolation is expected to be published in the coming months.

And the sweet part of the deal for us is that, since NASA recently made all the research it funds available for free , we won't have to wait too long to find out just what happens during a year in (almost) space.

But for now, the researchers are entitled to a holiday, and what better place to enjoy a little R&R than Hawaii? And you don't just have to take it from me:

Congrats to NASA and the scientists taking us a step closer to Mars. Now enjoy Hawaii and get a shave ice! https://t.co/lFZjSnn38x — President Obama (@POTUS44) August 29, 2016

When a Mars Simulation Goes Wrong

A recent mission atop a Hawaiian volcano shows humans still have much to learn before they set foot on another world.

T he drive to the little white dome on the northern slope of Mauna Loa is a bumpy one. Mauna Loa, the “Long Mountain,” is a colossal volcano that covers half of the island of Hawaii. The rocky terrain, rusty brown and deep red, crunches beneath car tires and jostles passengers. Up there, more than 8,000 feet above sea level and many miles away from the sounds of civilization, it doesn’t feel like Earth. It feels like another planet. Like Mars.

For the past five years, small groups of people have made this drive and moved into the dome, known as a habitat. Their job is to pretend that they really are on Mars, and then spend months living like it. The goal, for the researchers who send them there, is to figure out how human beings would do on a mission to the real thing.

In February of this year, the latest batch of pioneers, a crew of four, made the journey up the mountain. They settled in for an eight-month stay. Four days later, one of them was taken away on a stretcher and hospitalized.

The remaining crew members were evacuated by mission support. All four eventually returned to the habitat, not to continue their mission, but to pack up their stuff. Their simulation was over for good. The little white dome has remained empty since, and the University of Hawaii, which runs the program, and NASA , which funds it, are investigating the incident that derailed the mission.

T he mission that began in February was the sixth iteration of the Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation, or HI-SEAS . The durations have varied, from four months to a full year, and participants come from all over the world and different fields.

H I-SEAS is a social experiment, and the participants are the lab rats. They wear devices to track their vitals, movements, and sleep, answer countless questionnaires about their own behavior and their interactions with others, and journal several times a week about their feelings.

Psychology researchers take all that data and use them to tease out information about what works and what doesn’t when you stick people in a tiny space they can’t escape. (Hint: They get on each other’s nerves—a lot—as documented in a recent podcast series, The Habitat . There’s also a little romance.)

Meanwhile, the crew members live as much as possible like they are on Mars. They eat freeze-dried food, use a composting toilet, take 30-second showers to conserve water, and never step outside without a space suit and helmet. They don’t communicate with anyone in real time, not even family. An email to mission support or their loved ones takes 20 minutes to get there. Receiving a response takes another 20 minutes. They’re not allowed to see anyone outside of the mission.

The habitat is a tight squeeze. The ground floor, which includes a kitchen, bathroom, a lab, and exercise spaces, measures 993 square feet. The second floor, where the bedrooms are, spans 424 square feet.

“You really do get the sense, when you’re going to sleep and you’re closing your eyes at night, that this could be a distant planet,” says Ross Lockwood, a physicist from Edmonton, Canada, and one of the members of mission two. “This could be Mars.”

But sometimes, Earth finds a way of sneaking in, of breaking the fuzzy boundary between simulation and reality.

Mission six arrived at the habitat on February 15. The crew waved goodbye to the researchers gathered outside the dome, felt the breeze on their faces for the last time for a long time, and piled in. The doors closed. Michaela Musilova, one of the crew members, described their first moments in an interview in April with The Cosmic Shed , a science podcast. (Musilova declined an interview with The Atlantic .)

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“Our commander cited part of [the 2011 novel] The Martian . I think it was the very first line of The Martian , like, ‘Oh, we’re fucked now,’ or something along those lines,” recalled Musilova, an astrobiologist from Slovakia. “And so we just gave each other a big hug and like, ‘Okay, we can do this.’”

The first few days were cloudy, which can be a problem on the volcano. The habitat and its systems run on a battery bank that is charged each day through a large solar array on the grounds. On cloudy or rainy days, it can be difficult for the batteries to bounce back. When this happens, the crew is supposed to suit up, go outside, and turn on a car-size backup generator that runs on propane.

“We really make it as primitive as some farm in Vermont,” says Bill Wiecking, the HI-SEAS tech-support lead and the energy-lab director at the Hawaii Preparatory Academy. Mission support receives text-message alerts when the habitat’s life-sustaining systems reach dangerous levels, but for the most part, it’s up to the crew to manage their use.

As stubborn clouds hung over the habitat, the crew tried to minimize their energy use. They dimmed most of the lights, kept kitchen appliances unplugged, and stayed off the treadmill.

On the morning of February 19, Lisa Stojanovski, a science communicator from Australia, woke up to find that the power in the habitat had gone out. “We must have used too much power, I guess,” she told me.

Stojanovski and another crew member initiated the procedures for leaving the habitat. They shimmied into their space suits, stepped outside, and headed for the backup propane generator, located nearby on the grounds. Stojanovski and her partner would flip a switch to bring the generator to life, while the two other crew members would flip a switch on a circuit breaker inside the habitat. This maneuver would shift the power source from the dead batteries over to the generator, Stojanovski said.

When it was done, Stojanovski came back inside. “I was elated that we were on track to solve the problem, and I was pretty bouncy and excited,” she said. “It was a little jarring at first, when the two crew members who were inside didn’t quite share the excitement. That was my first gut feeling that something was not quite right.”

One of the crew members was typing furiously at a computer. The other looked stricken, pale. They said they didn’t feel well.

They said they had sustained an electric shock.

Nothing like this had ever happened before inside the habitat. Kim Binsted, the HI-SEAS principal investigator and a professor at the University of Hawaii, told me that injuries during previous missions ranged from bruises and scrapes, acquired during treks across the rocky landscape, to “household accidents.” “The kinds of things that you can hurt yourself doing at home are also the kinds of things that you can hurt yourself doing at the hab,” Binsted said.

Stojanovski said she suspects the electric shock may have occurred because the crew member’s fingers brushed against live wiring. “In a regular household circuit breaker, you have a safety panel that covers all the live wiring that’s behind the switches,” Stojanovski said. “Unfortunately, our circuit breaker didn’t have one of those.”

The injured crew member was shivering. They lay down on the floor. The others covered them in blankets.

The crew placed several calls to the mission’s on-call doctor on an emergency cellphone in the habitat, which works in real time, but there was no answer.

The person designated as the crew commander then called 911 on the emergency line. The crew wasn’t supposed to have contact with people outside of the habitat. If first responders came to the dome, the simulation would be compromised. Stojanovski said the commander told her he wasn’t calling to summon an ambulance, but only to ask for medical advice. This took her aback. Stojanovski believed they needed an ambulance, and they needed it now.

The crew commander, Sukjin Han, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Texas at Austin from South Korea, told me he signed off on most of the important decisions during the mission, but that he made sure to “hear the thoughts and opinions of all crew members beforehand and reflect them in the decisions.” In the tense moments after the accident, Han went with the majority.

“The majority of the members—including the member who experienced the incident—decided that we [wanted] to ask for medical advice from 911, before asking for an ambulance. I don’t remember if Lisa had the same opinion but I do remember that she never objected to the plan,” Han said. “I have never thought and don’t think that maintaining the simulation is more important than the safety of the crew.”

During their training, HI-SEAS crew are told often that their well-being comes first. Safety is paramount. But so is maintaining the simulation. No one involved in HI-SEAS wants to jeopardize the data by breaking the sim, as they sometimes call it. They don’t want to give up before it’s over, either. Leaving the habitat would mean throwing away hours and hours of physical, social, and emotional investment. For participants who came from outside of the United States, it even means visa troubles.

“We all left our regular lives, quit our jobs in some cases, left our loved ones to go spend eight months doing this,” said Laura Lark, a software developer in New York who participated in mission five. “So we’re all pretty committed to getting high-quality data out of it.”

The thought of abandoning the simulation becomes more painful the longer the mission goes on. The crew members of mission six were faced with this dilemma just four days in. What if it were four months?

In one of the early missions, a crew member unwittingly turned on an internet access point that interfered with the HI-SEAS network, causing a communications blackout between the mountain and mission support. Wiecking had to go up the mountain to fix it, a move that could have jeopardized the integrity of the crew’s isolation. As Wiecking fiddled quietly with hardware a few feet from the dome, he could hear the voices of the crew through the tentlike walls. “That was so close to breaking the simulation, we had to have a big review over it,” he said.

During Lockwood’s mission, the second mission of the HI-SEAS project, a crew member decided to withdraw because of a chronic medical issue. “We struggled with the idea of what we would do if we really were on Mars,” Lockwood said. They decided to pretend that the crew member died. They imagined that they would leave his corpse out in the Martian atmosphere, where it would not decompose as it would on Earth , in the hopes of bringing it back to Earth for burial.

And they actually acted this all out. Lockwood said they had the departing crew member step into the vestibule that separates the habitat from the outside, the simulated “airlock.” The person stood there for five minutes, as they all would do before doing an extravehicular activity (EVA), and waited, pretending the airlock was depressurizing, evening out the pressure inside and outside, so they could safely exit. Then the crew member opened the door and walked outside, where mission support staff picked them up and took them down the mountain.

This time, in mission six, the danger was real. As the crew tried to figure out what to do, Stojanovski started to get worried about the injured crew member. “They were going downhill,” she said. “They had a tight chest and some pain behind the shoulder blades. I’m not a doctor or anything like that, but those kinds of symptoms freaked me out a little bit. I was pretty worried that they were going to have a heart attack or something.” The crew had received first-aid training, but the situation seemed to require more than that.

She called Binsted, the HI-SEAS principal investigator, and told her what happened. No one could reach the on-call doctor. Stojanovski said Binsted told the crew to call 911 again. This time, they asked for an ambulance.

“Throughout all our training, we’d been told, ‘Don’t worry, emergency services knows where you are, they know who you are, and they know how to get to you,’” Stojanovski said. “I was like, ‘My name’s Lisa, I’m from the HI-SEAS project, we would like an ambulance please, this is where we are.’ And they were like, ‘You’re from what project? Where are you located?’”

Stojanovski’s call to 911 had been picked up by Hawaii County dispatchers, but help would arrive from elsewhere.

The Pohakuloa Training Area is a U.S. Army base of several hundred people, located less than 15 miles from the habitat. Its jurisdiction stretches from Mauna Loa to Mauna Kea—and the HI-SEAS habitat sits nearly in the middle. Like the habitat, Pohakuloa is isolated from the rest of the world. The remoteness requires the military base to operate like a city, complete with a fire department and EMTs.

“We got the call that morning that there was a potential electrocution, that the individual was awake and conscious, but [they were] breathing heavily and [they] needed to be checked out,” says Eric Moller, the fire chief of the Pohakuloa Training Area, about the call from Hawaii County. “They were afraid about hypertension, elevated blood pressure.” The Army base dispatched an ambulance carrying four responders.

On a clear day, the drive from the base to the habitat takes 35 to 45 minutes. According to a response report from Pohakuloa obtained by The Atlantic , the drive took 43 minutes on February 19. Inside the habitat, the minutes seemed to drag like hours. At one point, Stojanovski said one of the responders called the habitat to say they were lost.

Moller said Pohakuloa’s fire captain phoned the habitat because responders were concerned about the conditions of the roads, which are unpaved, but they weren’t lost. When they reached a gate along the route to the habitat, they found that the lock was jammed. This added to their response time.

“Our guys go up and down that mountain all the time,” says Gregory Fleming, Pohakuloa’s deputy garrison commander, often to rescue lost hikers in flip-flops. And military staff know not to disturb their neighbors, the fake astronauts. They have been advised that any interaction risks wrecking their delicate reality.

When the crew finally heard tires grinding over rock outside, Stojanovski turned toward the exit, ready to greet the first responders. Han stopped her, she said, warning that whatever happened next would break the simulation. “I actually lost my temper at this point,” Stojanovski said. “I don’t remember exactly what I said, but there were some curse words involved.”

Han said he remembers Stojanovski moving quickly to the door. “I correctly remember that at least two of the members, including myself, called her name, almost simultaneously,” he said. “At least for myself, it was partly in order to calm her down, because she has suddenly become very emotional at that very moment, and give [her] at least one second to think about her reaction.”

Stojanovski could have ignored the others. H I-SEAS participants receive specific roles, like commander or communications specialist or health officer, but compliance is not compulsory as it would be, for example, in a military mission. “They have to fulfill those roles, but ultimately as they come together as a team, that’s something the crew have to figure out on their own,” says Joseph Gruber, the mission-support coordinator for HI-SEAS , and one of the people who regularly communicates with crews over email. “There’s structures in place and we give them guidelines on how best to do this, but it’s up to them. They’re the ones up there.”

Stojanovski decided to heed Han’s request. She didn’t go outside.

Stojanovski opened the door and waved the first responders into habitat. They loaded the injured crew member into the ambulance and checked their vitals. The ambulance drove down the volcano as far it could go; after about 20 miles, the vehicle neared the edge of Pohakuloa’s jurisdiction, a line the first responders aren’t allowed to cross. If they travel beyond this region, the reasoning goes, they leave the Pohakuloa residents at risk.

A hospital ambulance met the Pohakuloa ambulance at this edge, grabbed the crew member, and sped toward Hilo Medical Center, about 30 miles east of the habitat.

“It was really surreal when the ambulance drove away and there was kind of just silence,” Stojanovski recalled. “Like, wow, what just happened?”

B ack at their training base, a house in Kona, Stojanovski compiled a list of safety concerns about the habitat and sent it to Binsted, who confirmed she received it. Binsted wanted to continue the mission after getting approval from the university and NASA . Stojanovski said she did too, but only after mission support addressed her concerns and implemented some fixes.

Stojanovski sought some reassurance, but Binsted couldn’t make any guarantees, at least not before an investigation. “I kind of sat there and thought, You know what? I’m not okay with this ,” Stojanovski said. “I’m not okay with the culture and the attitude toward safety.” Now that she was off the mountain and out of the bubble, her perception of the mission changed. She decided to withdraw from it altogether.

Binsted, the principal investigator, said she could not discuss the specifics of the incident until the institutional review boards, one at the University of Hawaii and one at NASA , concluded their investigations and issued reports and recommendations.

Musilova, Han, and the fourth crew member, Calum Hervieu, an astrophysicist and systems engineer from Scotland, declined extensive interviews but provided The Atlantic with a joint statement, saying, in part, “We prefer not to discuss this topic with the media” until the University of Hawaii and NASA complete their reviews. They point to press releases from February , which say only that a crew member was hospitalized, treated at the hospital for a few hours, and then released.

Stojanovski said mission support was understanding and professional about her decision. Her fellow crew members were shocked and tried to persuade her to stay. If Stojanovski left, they all had to. H I-SEAS protocol prohibits a crew smaller than four, which produces fewer data for the researchers. There’s also the matter of maintaining the habitat and its various systems—power, water, food, the toilet—which requires several sets of hands.

They couldn’t replace Stojanovski with a backup, either; HI-SEAS missions are set up to investigate the evolution of one particular crew over time, and besides, finding someone willing to fly out to Hawaii for an eight-month mission on such short notice would be difficult.

Every HI-SEAS mission since the first one in 2013 has had a crew of six. Mission six started out that way, too, but two people were removed from the program, one of them just days before she said she was scheduled to fly from Australia to Hawaii. Binsted said she couldn’t comment on why mission six went ahead with four.

Brian Shiro, a geophysicist at the U.S. Geological Survey’s Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, who has worked on HI-SEAS since its inception, told me staff deliberated about whether to move forward with a smaller crew. “At any point along this timeline, there could have been a hard decision to delay the mission or cancel, but that’s not what they decided,” Shiro said. “I was on the side of the fence to delay. I didn’t want to start this mission because of the crew size. I said, ‘Guys, let’s find more people, let’s wait a few months at least.’ But I was overruled.”

He added: “This crew was very, very impressive, very professional, very motivated. But there were only four of them, and that left them vulnerable.”

During a real Mars mission, crew members will face a panoply of risks. People can, and probably will, get injured. They may die. Simulations like HI-SEAS attempt to forecast reactions to some of these threats, ranging from the things we cannot control, like the poisonous air outside, to those that we can only intuit, like the ideal way to organize a crew.

“We have things that we know we don’t know,” says Jenn Fogarty, the chief scientist at NASA ’s Human Research Program, the office that provides financial grants to HI-SEAS . “The ‘I don’t know what I don’t know’ is the scary space.”

Long before we send the first humans to Mars and keep them happy and healthy, we’ll have to figure out how to do that here—and it starts with deciding who should be on the mountain, which isn’t easy.

“You can select a crew all you want, get the right fit and mix, but there’s too many variables when it comes to human beings,” says Raphael Rose, the associate director of the Anxiety and Depression Research Center at UCLA, who was set to study stress management and resilience on mission six. “It’s just really hard to predict how we’re going to perform in all situations.”

M ission six arrived on Mauna Loa after the customary, rigorous application process that requires written essays, reference checks, Skype interviews, and, perhaps most important, the same kind of psychological screenings that NASA gives its astronauts. With each iteration of HI-SEAS , researchers and mission personnel learn a bit more about crew composition and what types of people work well together.

Steve Kozlowski, an organizational psychologist at Michigan State University who studies team effectiveness, says HI-SEAS finalists are scored on five personality traits, known in the field as the Big Five: extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness to experience. Kozlowski says they want conscientious people, but up to a point. Conscientiousness can veer toward passivity. Some degree of extroversion is valuable, until it’s too much. Outgoing people can morph into domineering people. In other words, it’s all about balance.

“There’s no magic formula,” Kozlowski says.

Psychological screenings can predict only so much. “Sometimes people look really good on paper and they might even interview well, but if there’s a big red flag on that screening, it gives one pause,” Shiro said. “There’ve been people we’ve ruled out because of that.”

During the mission, crews make regular trips outside of the habitat to explore the volcanic terrain in their space suits. To prepare them for this EVA, Shiro leads participants on excursions across the rugged landscape soon after they arrive in Hawaii. “Three days in the field in those conditions is a good way to get to know people,” he said. “There’s people that I think, Eh, I wonder how that one’s gonna do . Usually, that gut feeling, there’s something to it.”

A real mission to Mars would likely require crews to train together for months, maybe even years—far longer than the nine days of training that mission six had, Shiro said. Crew members would be put through a multitude of stressful situations to test their reactions. “You would tease out any red flags before you even left Earth,” Shiro said.

Shiro said one of his gut feelings kicked in during the fieldwork training for mission six. “There was this one person who was not as comfortable in the field,” he said. “That’s the sort of thing you don’t know until you get out there. Still did it, did all the training—a little slower, but did it all. But when the incident happened that ultimately led to the cancelation of the mission, that’s the person who quit. And it was not a surprise to any of us because we said, ‘Yeah, you know, she was a little more timid out there.’”

Stojanovski rebuffed Shiro’s assessment of her training. “I actually enjoyed being out in the field,” she said. “In fact, I was the first to volunteer to go outside on an emergency space walk on the morning of the incident.”

The HI-SEAS staff say the habitat is a safe environment.

“We’ve learned all the ways that you can kill yourself on Mars, and we’ve learned to prevent those things,” Wiecking says. “So it’s been very, very valuable, because it’s way better to do it here, where you can drive up and go, ‘Oh gosh, a water valve opened up and now you don’t have any water.’ Instead of on Mars, where it’s like, ‘You don’t have any water, you guys are gonna die in a couple of days.’”

Round-trip communication between Earth and Mars will take about 40 minutes. Astronauts won’t have the luxury of sitting around and waiting for commands or approval from Earth. H I-SEAS has mission support , rather than mission control , for that reason. The first astronauts on Mars will choose for themselves, for the most part, how they will live and work. In case of an emergency, they will need to decide what to do. And there’s no guarantee the astronauts won’t choose to take matters into their own hands.

“That’s the complexity of humans. They are going to do things on their own, maybe outside of the mission rules. They are going to try to make things work on their own, and they’re inventive and smart, and that’s the reason you picked this crew,” Fogarty says. “So thinking you can keep them in this tight little box of emotions is unrealistic.”

The potential cracks in the relationship between crew and mission support are already showing. Last year, when Hurricane Harvey struck Texas and forced the displacement of thousands, NASA staff decided to evacuate the members of a space simulation in Houston. For several weeks, a crew of four lives and works inside a cozy fake spaceship at the Johnson Space Center, pretending they’re coasting toward an asteroid.

“When we woke them up that Sunday morning and told them to pack up, that we were terminating the mission, they were not happy with us,” says Lisa Spence, the flight-analog project manager for the program, known as the Human Exploration Research Analog ( HERA ).

“One of them was pretty upset and not very complimentary and [asked us], ‘Why are you doing this? There’s no problem here, we want to continue.’ It wasn’t until the vehicle came and evacuated them and took them to the hotel, and they could see cars stranded all over the place, and boats that had been washed up onto the streets, and several feet of water across the roads—then they kind of appreciated why we stopped.”

The mission support at HERA had better information than the crew did, and because they sit in the same warehouse, just 20 feet away from the “spaceship,” they could make a decision for the crew. That won’t be possible on Mars. If the crew goes rogue, the people back on Earth might have no idea. Some degree of eavesdropping on the crew might be necessary, according to Sonja Schmer-Galunder, a researcher at Smart Information Flow Technologies, whose work on HI-SEAS was aimed at developing ways to predict the behavioral health of individuals and the team.

“I’m not the person to decide where the limits of their privacy are, and clearly you have to be able to withdraw and also have your private space. Is it ethical?” Schmer-Galunder says. “I mean, if people are signing up to go to Mars, I think everything should and must be done in order to bring the crew back safe. When you’re signing up for a Mars mission, you know that you’re giving yourself away in almost every aspect of your life. You become a tool that is being sent out there.”

T he HI-SEAS program is now on hold until the University of Hawaii and NASA complete their separate reviews. Fogarty, of NASA ’s Human Research Program, is supportive of Binsted and the project. Fogarty says it’s possible that the university and the space agency could come to different conclusions about the incident, which could determine the future of the HI-SEAS project.

“In the future, NASA may not participate in it if we don’t feel that our safety threshold for participants is met,” Fogarty says.

H I-SEAS , which is run mostly by volunteers, could continue on its own. But NASA ’s withdrawal would be detrimental to the agency, which doesn’t have any similar Mars simulations. The longest run of HERA , the asteroid analog, was just 45 days.

Stojanovski returned to Australia soon after the mission ended. She had resigned from a job on the communications team at Rocket Lab, a U.S. spaceflight company with a subsidiary based in New Zealand, after finding out she had been selected for the HI-SEAS program. When she withdrew from the mission, the job had already been filled. She worked at a fish market for a few months when she came home. She recently found another role at Rocket Lab, as an executive assistant, and moved to Auckland in May.

According to their personal websites, Musilova and Hervieu have found work at the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, located near the summit of Mauna Kea, less than 40 miles north of the habitat. “I’ve been saying c’est la vie quite a lot recently, and that’s really how it is,” Musilova said in the Cosmic Shed interview. “Life happens.” Han is still listed as a professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

Stojanovski has stayed in some touch with Binsted and Musilova. She hasn’t spoken with Hervieu or Han.

Several months removed from that February morning, Stojanovski said she wishes her crew’s panicked discussions had gone differently.

“I really regret that I followed orders that were not in the spirit of crew health and safety, just for the sake of keeping the mission within the simulation,” she said.

I asked Stojanovski whether she regrets withdrawing from the mission. She said it was a hard decision. But no, she doesn’t.

“In a way, I am kind of glad that this happened, because it’s been able to be a learning opportunity that exposes all the weak points in the system,” she said. “We can make the system strong so that people, when they do eventually get to Mars and they have a situation like this, they can be in a better position to tackle it. You’re increasing their chances of surviving something like this.”

Stojanovski remembers fondly the few days her crew had on the volcano before Earth came knocking on their door. It was cozy in that little white dome. One crew member had brought ping-pong paddles, so they cleared a table and started bouncing the ball back and forth, click, clack . Another came with an electronic keyboard and played classical compositions at night. Distinctly Earthly noises in a place that felt anything like home. They wafted around the habitat, pierced its thin walls, and drifted out into the silent expanse.

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Mauna Loa, Hawaii — Sheyna Gifford scoops up a handful of reddish volcanic rocks, buries her nose in it, and takes a long, deep breath.

“Wow,” she says. “There’s no planet like home.”

Gifford, a physician and journalist , just completed a yearlong simulated Mars mission that required her and five crewmates to live in a two-story dome placed 8,200 feet (2,500 meters) up the slopes of Mauna Loa—the fourth iteration of the Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation, or HI-SEAS , project.

Sunday, August 28, was the first time the crew had left Mars-on-Earth without spacesuits since last August. For 365.5 days, they worked together, lived together, cooked together, hunkered down and shivered through relentlessly chilly days together. No visits from friends, no phone calls to family, no one to rely on but each other.

Gifford holds up her hand in the dewy wind blowing across the mountain and lets it catch the breeze. “This feels good,” she says. (Also see "Astronauts Embark on a Training Mission Deep Beneath the Earth." )

It’s been a long year being constantly enclosed, and reentering the world means not only grappling with an onslaught of reporters, but also dealing with a slew of normally mundane sensations that are somehow much more meaningful.

Among those: fresh air.

“It smells like my memory of the ocean. Now the question is, how accurate is my memory? Memory is very fallible. The only way to know if I’m right is to go there immediately. Let’s go,” Gifford says. Then she looks over to the tables where her fellow “lavanauts” are enjoying their first fresh fruit and at least one pizza in a year.

“They’re eating food, and I’m smelling dirt,” she says, grinning.

Social Experiment

This mission marks the longest amount of time a crew has spent on Hawaii’s version of Mars on Earth. Previous simulations in the NASA-funded study, run by the University of Hawaii at Manoa , have lasted for either four or eight months. The next missions, set to begin in 2017 and 2018 , will each go for eight months.

Each time, researchers select a six-member crew and challenge them to survive in a solar-powered, uninsulated dome that comes equipped with all the luxuries (or lack thereof) one might find in an actual interplanetary habitat.

The crew enjoyed amenities such as composting toilets, freeze-dried meat, and limited medical supplies (fortunately, no major injuries occurred). They also lived with a 20-minute communications delay with people outside the dome, and personal living spaces smaller than the closets at nearby resorts. Entertainment included rousing rounds of Yahtzee and some reluctant salsa dancing. Crew members recommended bringing a Kindle and a ukulele to combat boredom, among other things.

The mission can’t fully simulate what it’s like to be on Mars—Earth’s gravity won’t cooperate with that, for one thing. (Read about how human visitors will get back off Mars. )

The HI-SEAS habitat was set up in a region of Hawaii that resembles the harsh, rocky landscape on Mars.

“If you’re the kind of person who can’t really suspend disbelief—who knows there’s air in the airlock, who’s more than happy to walk out that door—you’re probably not the kind of person who would want to come on this mission,” says Andrzej Stewart , the mission’s chief engineering officer. “You have to suspend disbelief a little bit to really get the full experience.”

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But projects like HI-SEAS can help scientists learn how small groups work together in the context of a journey to deep space. What makes a particularly effective crew? When and why do things fall apart? What are the psychological effects of being isolated from one’s friends and family? How can crews be trained to tolerate stressful environments?

“This is about crew cohesion and performance, so how do we keep a crew cohesive? How do we select a crew and train a crew so that they can be resilient?” says HI-SEAS principal investigator Kim Binsted , who was the first person to greet the crew as they unzipped the hatch and stepped into unsimulated reality.

“What we’ve found is that there’s no magic bullet to prevent conflict, it’s how you deal with it and how you respond to it. Not just as individuals, but as a group.”

That’s true in real life, too, notes crew commander Carmel Johnston , who is a soil scientist by training. “But how you deal with that in a dome or in a confined space is much different than if you can just walk away,” she says. “We want to learn everything that can go wrong before it goes wrong in space and prevent it from happening.”

Simulation Inside a Simulation

At least two crew members experienced deaths in their families while they were in the simulation. Others missed out on weddings and births. Holidays came and went, celebrated through text message, email, or recorded video messages.

This crew, though, had the advantage of testing a new virtual reality component. For the first time, researchers enabled a VR environment within the habitat that would let crew members both construct their own realities and experience 30 different VR environments and messages sent from back home.

Some of those messages, said researcher Peggy Wu , took the form of family members enjoying a Thanksgiving meal—a recorded scene in which, with the help of faraway friends, the crew could immerse themselves. The point, Wu says, is to see whether VR could be used to help facilitate connection and alleviate the stress that comes from isolation on deep space missions.

Though she’s just beginning to sift through the full year’s worth of data, reports from the first half of the simulation look promising. Crew member Tristan Bassingthwaighte certainly had a good time making his own VR environment, which took the form of an elaborate tree house.

“I took one of the biggest house models that was available, put it up there, and just started going crazy,” says Bassingthwaighte, an architecture graduate student. “Made a giant lounge full of natural art and a waterfall with a tiger guarding it. Put a couple of frogs there, a man-den with a bar and a pool table, a bunch of tubs out on a balcony, the back of the house has a bunch of waterfalls and a pirate ship—just anything I can do for fun … took me like three weeks.”

Aside from VR, personal time and space were at a minimum. Escaping the domehab meant venturing outside in a full space suit and contending with miles of crumbly, sharp volcanic scree. Gingerly picking one’s way through that jumble of rocks is tricky at best, but with a full spacesuit on, it could be disastrous. Still, for Bassingthwaighte, one of those excursions was his only real alone time—he wandered around with his radio off, singing along loudly to AC/DC and Martin Sexton for a few hours.

“That was probably the most alone I’ve been for the whole year,” he says. “You need to unwind and have time to yourself. People are social creatures, but not all the time.” (Also see "Want Humans on Mars? Start With a Martian Space Station.")

There’s no question that the physical demands of spaceflight are immense. Living on Mars, with its unbreathable atmosphere, lack of liquid surface water, and toxic soil, will challenge the hardiest of astronauts. But the psychological demands of deep space travel are also immense. Days off are rare, and there’s the constant, undeniable pressure of being humanity’s ambassadors to the cosmos.

"We represent the people of Earth,” Gifford says. “You all couldn't come here, so we came for you."

Follow Nadia Drake on Twitter .

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Mock Mars Crew Emerges from Dome in Hawaii After 8 Months of Isolation

After spending eight months simulating life on Mars on the slopes of the Mauna Loa volcano, six "astronauts" emerged from their Hawaiian habitat on Sunday (Sept. 17) to return to civilization. 

This concluded the fifth mock Mars mission of the NASA-funded HI-SEAS program (Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation). Operated by the University of Hawaii, this research project studies how groups of interplanetary travelers would work together on long-term missions while in cramped quarters. 

During the mission, four men and two women lived in isolation from the rest of planet Earth and could eat only shelf-stable foods and occasional lab-grown vegetables. When communicating with the outside world, they had to deal with the 20-minute delay that astronauts on Mars would experience as well. And any time they went outside, they had to put on their spacesuits. [ In Photos: 8 Months on 'Mars' with the HI-SEAS Mission V Crew ] 

The Mission V crew entered the HI-SEAS dome on Jan. 19 . During their eight-month stay on Mauna Loa, the world's largest active volcano, they conducted scientific experiments, performed daily exercises and maintained equipment in and around the dome. Outside the dome, the astronauts did geological fieldwork in their spacesuits just as if they were on Mars. 

While HI-SEAS studies the more technical and practical aspects of living on Mars, a large part of the investigation is to see how a group of people live together in isolation with little to no privacy. [ On Months-Long Missions, How Durable Is An Astronaut's Mind? ]

"Long-term space travel is absolutely possible," Laura Lark, IT specialist for HI-SEAS V, said in a video. "There are certainly technical challenges to be overcome. There are certainly human factors to be figured out, that’s part of what HI-SEAS is for. But I think that overcoming those challenges is just a matter of effort. We are absolutely capable of it."

After the crew emerged from the HI-SEAS dome at 9 a.m. EDT (1300 GMT), they " felt the sun and wind on their faces and ate fresh tropical papaya, pineapple and bananas with friends and family," University of Hawaii officials said in a statement . 

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"My advice to mission six is say, 'Yes.’" HI-SEAS V health and performance officer Brian Ramos said in the video. "If you have an opportunity whether it’s filming or learning a new science skill or flying the drone, going out to a lava tube, whatever it is, say, "Yes.' Take leadership on things. Honestly, you can come out of here in eight months learning a ton of stuff." [ We Visited Mock Mars: Here's What It's Like to Live There ]

The next HI-SEAS mission, HI-SEAS VI, is scheduled to begin in 2018 and will also last eight months. 

Email Hanneke Weitering at [email protected] or follow her @hannekescience . Follow us @Spacedotcom , Facebook and Google+ . Original article on Space.com .

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: [email protected].

Hanneke Weitering is a multimedia journalist in the Pacific Northwest reporting on the future of aviation at FutureFlight.aero and Aviation International News and was previously the Editor for Spaceflight and Astronomy news here at Space.com. As an editor with over 10 years of experience in science journalism she has previously written for Scholastic Classroom Magazines, MedPage Today and The Joint Institute for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. After studying physics at the University of Tennessee in her hometown of Knoxville, she earned her graduate degree in Science, Health and Environmental Reporting (SHERP) from New York University. Hanneke joined the Space.com team in 2016 as a staff writer and producer, covering topics including spaceflight and astronomy. She currently lives in Seattle, home of the Space Needle, with her cat and two snakes. In her spare time, Hanneke enjoys exploring the Rocky Mountains, basking in nature and looking for dark skies to gaze at the cosmos. 

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Mars research subjects to emerge after 8 months of isolation

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HONOLULU (AP) — After eight months of living in isolation on a remote Hawaii volcano, six NASA-backed research subjects will emerge from their Mars-like habitat on Sunday and return to civilization.

Their first order of business after subsisting on mostly freeze-dried and canned food: Feast on fresh-picked pineapple, papaya, mango, locally grown vegetables and a fluffy, homemade egg strata cooked by their project’s lead scientist.

The crew of four men and two women were quarantined on a vast plain below the summit of the world’s largest active volcano in January. All of their communications with the outside world were subjected to a 20-minute delay — the time it takes for signals to get from Mars to Earth.

They are part of a study designed to better understand the psychological effects that a long-term manned mission to space would have on astronauts. The data they gathered will help NASA better pick crews that have certain traits and a better chance of doing well during a two-to-three year Mars expedition.

The space agency hopes to send humans to the red planet by the 2030s.

The Hawaii team wore specially-designed sensors to gauge their moods and proximity to other people in the small, 1,200 square-foot (111-square meter) dome where they have lived.

The devices monitored, among other things, their voice levels and could sense if people were avoiding one another. It could also detect if they were next to each other and arguing.

The crew played games designed to measure their compatibility and stress levels. And when they got overwhelmed by being in such close proximity to teach other, they could use virtual reality devices to escape to tropical beaches or other familiar landscapes.

The project’s lead investigator, University of Hawaii professor Kim Binsted, said the crew members also kept written logs about how they were feeling.

“This is our fifth mission, and we have learned a lot over those five missions. We’ve learned, for one thing, that conflict, even in the best of teams, is going to arise,” Binsted said. “So what’s really important is to have a crew that, both as individuals and a group, is really resilient, is able to look at that conflict and come back from it.”

The project is the fifth in a series of six NASA-funded studies at the University of Hawaii facility called the Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation, or HI-SEAS. NASA has dedicated about $2.5 million to the studies at the facility.

“So the previous three missions, the four, eight and 12 month missions, those were primarily looking at crew cohesion and performance,” Binsted said. “On this mission and going forward we are looking at crew selection and composition.”

Crew members were mostly excited and optimistic when they entered the facility in January, but had some trepidation.

“My biggest fear was that we were going to be that crew that turned out like Biosphere 2, which wasn’t a very pretty picture,” said mission commander James Bevington in January.

Biosphere 2 was a 1990s experimental greenhouse-like habitat in Arizona that turned into a debacle. It housed different ecosystems and a crew of four men and four women in an effort to understand what would be needed for humans to live on other planets. The participants were supposed to grow their own food and recycle their air inside the sealed glass space.

But the experiment soon spiraled out of control, with the carbon dioxide level rising dangerously and plants and animals dying. The crew members grew hungry and squabbled so badly during the two years they spent cooped up that by the time they emerged, some of them were not speaking to each other. Unlike the Biosphere 2, HI-SEAS is an opaque structure, not a see-through one, and it is not airtight.

The HI-SEAS crew was not confined to the dome but they were required to wear spacesuits and whenever they went outside the dome for geological expeditions, mapping studies or other tasks.

Other Mars simulation projects exist around the world, but Hawaii researchers say one of the chief advantages of their project is the area’s rugged, Mars-like landscape, on a rocky, red plain below the summit of Mauna Loa, the world’s largest active volcano.

The crew’s vinyl-covered shelter is about the size of a small two-bedroom home, has small sleeping quarters for each member plus a kitchen, laboratory and bathroom. The group shares one shower and has two composting toilets.

To maintain the crew’s sense of isolation, bundles of food and supplies were dropped off at a distance from the dome, and the team members sent out a robot to retrieve them.

The team’s information technology specialist, Laura Lark, thinks a trip to Mars is a reasonable goal for NASA.

“Long term space travel is absolutely possible,” she said in a video message from within the dome. “There are certainly technical challenges to be overcome. There are certainly human factors to be figured out.”

The university is already starting to make plans for Mission 6, the final study funded by the U.S. space agency.

Follow AP correspondent Caleb Jones on Twitter: https://twitter.com/CalebAP

August 29, 2016

Mock Mars Explorers Emerge from Habitat to End Year of Isolation in Hawaii

Six “astronauts” spent 12 months in a dome or wearing space suits on a barren volcano  

By Calla Cofield & SPACE.com

JON ROIG Flickr

MAUNA LOA, Hawaii ─ A crew of six "astronauts" returned to Earth Sunday (Aug. 28), after a  yearlong mock mission to Mars .

At about 9 a.m. HDT (3 p.m. EDT, 1900 GMT), on the barren slopes of the Mauna Loa volcano, the six crewmembers emerged from the domed white habitat they've called home for the last 12 months. The crew had no physical contact with anyone but each other, and had limited communication with friends, family and the outside world.

How did the crew feel upon their release? Christiane Heinicke, chief scientific officer and crew physicist, summed it up in one word: "Happyyyyy!" [ HI-SEAS One-Year Crew Comes Back to Earth (Gallery)]

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This is the fourth and  longest isolation mission by the HI-SEAS program (which stands for Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation), run by the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and funded by NASA.

The crew exited the domed habitat for the first time in 12 months without wearing spacesuits, and were greeted by family, friends, the mission scientists and team members who supported them through the year, and members of the media.

"There's no place like Earth. It is a little bit like the tornado returning to Kansas," said Sheyna E. Gifford, chief medical and safety officer and crew journalist. "All of a sudden, I click my heels three times and stepped several inches, and 100 million miles later [I'm back on Earth]."

Andrzej Stewart, chief engineering officer, said he felt "mixed emotions" about leaving the habitat.

"I'm a military brat, I grew up with my dad in the Air Force, and where you live becomes home after a while, and I'm going to miss the place," he said.

Life on Mars

The  HI-SEAS isolation missions  (there have been four) are meant to simulate what life might be like for people living on the surface of Mars or another planet other than Earth. The participants can only eat food that can be stored for years at a time, so no fresh fruit and vegetables. Upon exiting the habitat, the crewmembers were greeted with trays of fresh produce. Heinicke made a beeline for a carton of fresh raspberries she'd requested.

The crew was able to communicate with family and friends, but with a 20-minute communication delay, making phone calls impossible; they can bring books and movies but have very limited access to the internet (text only).

Exercise has to take place on a treadmill or stationary bike inside the dome. The crew members can't leave the dome except while wearing spacesuits (these outdoor activities are what NASA calls Extra Vehicular Activities, or EVAs). [ The 9 Coolest Mock Space Missions ]

"We definitely took a couple of, like, 6-hour EVAs just to go and explore everything behind us, or go back into lava tubes or just anything to get outside really. Like we didn't really have an objective, it was just kind of to walk around and have fun. So that helps," said Tristan Bassingthwaighte, the crew architect.

Trouble in paradise

Living in an isolated, contained space with six people for 12 months is stressful on its own, but of course the crew faced some unforeseen challenges as well. [ How Living on Mars Could Challenge Colonists (Infographic) ]

"Probably the biggest [surprise] I can think of was not that long ago when our plumbing shut down," Bassingthwaighte said. The crew disassembled nearly the entire system and changed out parts they thought might be causing the problem. "[We] spent two weeks showering out of buckets trying to figure out what was wrong, and it turned out just to be a filter that we needed to replace, and we had water again."

Heinicke said the most challenging thing as a scientist was knowing she couldn't order extra parts or supplies for her laboratory if she needed them. Cyprien Verseux, the crew biologist, and Gifford, said they faced the same challenge.

"If your equipment breaks  you can't just go to the supermarket or order it online  and have it delivered in a couple of days," Heinicke said. "You have to be able to make do with whatever you have onsite, and you have to be able to improvise [with] your research. That, for me, was a challenge but also a challenge from which I learned a lot."

Carmel Johnston, the crew commander, said one of the biggest challenges was learning how everyone dealt with stress or depression. 

"Everybody dealt with it in a different way, and so having somebody else deal with it in a different way than you can often be difficult, especially if you're not understanding why they are doing something the way they are," Johnston said. "Learning how everybody deals with stressful situations is really interesting, but also a learning experience."

Stewart echoed this sentiment and noted that the international nature of the crew (four Americans, one German and one Frenchman) could also lead to some misunderstanding about  how people deal with stress .

"Yeah, so I'm German, I don't talk a lot," Heinicke said. "And these guys here, they are American, and they talk all the time." (This comment garnered a laugh from her crewmates).

Building a crew for Mars

The HI-SEAS program initiates these isolation programs to learn about the experience that humans will have  when they set up long-duration camps on other planets  (or moons, or what have you). The primary science objective of this yearlong mission was to learn about crew cohesion, and how people might best deal with the psychological toll of a real mission.

So what makes a good crew for a planetary space mission?

The answer may lie in a classic line from literature, according to Kim Binsted, project principal investigator for HI-SEAS. She said that while studying the HI-SEAS crews, she was reminded of the opening lines from the novel "Anna Karenina" by Leo Tolstoy: "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." [ How Astronauts May Set Up Base Camps on Mars (Gallery) ]

"The crews, when they're working well — and they're very good crews, they're very competent and professional and cohesive — when they're working really well, they're very similar to each other," Binsted said. "But each crew has its own very particular conflicts."

Binsted can't talk about specific conflicts that arose in the one-year crew, both to protect crew confidentiality and because the scientific teams that study the crewmembers are still analyzing their data.

"I think, in a perfect world, NASA would have liked us to come back and say … 'The thing that causes problems in crews is X.' But that's not the case," Binsted said. "I think instead what you find is there's going to be  conflict on these long-duration missions . It just happens. So what you want instead is both individuals and teams that are resilient; that are able to come back from conflict and get back to a high-performing level. And that's something that you can both select for and train for. So I think that's the big picture."

As the mission leader, Johnston said she felt a certain responsibility to help crewmembers keep their spirits up (in addition to making sure all the work got done around the habitat).

"It was definitely difficult at times, especially if I wasn't in that mindset myself," she said. "Because for whatever reason, everybody has bad days, or everybody has something that's upsetting them, and trying to cheer somebody else up when you're, like, 'I'm dealing with my own stuff right now,' is pretty difficult." 

Besides the normal ups and downs, at least two of the crewmembers told reporters they had deaths in their family while they were away.

"I think we all kind of filled in at different times, and so we were all able to work together in order together to be like 'OK, so-and-so's having a rough time with whatever's going on in their life,' and we all pick up the [slack]," Johnson said. "And then, the next person has something fall down and you just kind of have a rotating roll of who gets to take a little bit of time off because something else more important in their mental life is going on."

In what is perhaps a reflection of Binsted's observation that each crew has its own unique conflicts, Johnston said her crewmates told her she was a neat freak — which came as quite a surprise.

"I apparently learned that I'm a neat freak, which I'm being honest about because apparently it's a big deal to everybody else," she said with a laugh. "I've never been told in my life that I was a neat freak, and my parents were always telling me when I was younger to clean up more and I always thought I'm just a slob. But it took living with people that have different standards to figure it out."

Tips for Mars

So after a year living together in isolation and containment, what would the HI-SEAS crew tell  astronauts headed to Mars  or some other destination?

"[Bring] a Kindle," Bassingthwaighte said. "Yeah, as many books as you can; movies tend to get really boring."

 "I think telling your family to pack something nice, just a couple of letters that you can open on specific dates, that's a very good idea," Heinicke added.

"Remember your crew is the most important thing, they're all you've got," Gifford said. "So keep yourself healthy, keep them healthy."

"Bring a ukulele," Verseux said. "No, seriously, playing music helps a lot and, like, a guitar is too big and a ukulele's perfect." (Verseux apparently also brought a digeridoo).

Would the crew go on a real Mars mission if they were given the chance?

All six immediately replied, "Yes." 

Yearlong Mock Mars Mission In Hawaii - What Was Studied? | Video

Living on 'Mars': 8-Month HI-SEAS Mock Space Mission in Photos

Mars Myths & Misconceptions: Quiz

Surviving 'The Martian': How to Stay Alive on Mars (Infographic)

Copyright 2016  SPACE.com , a Purch company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Six People Isolated In A Dome Complete Yearlong NASA Experiment

The scientists, pretending to be astronauts, lived in a dome on a remote part of Hawaii for 365 days to simulate what a space mission to Mars might be like.

BuzzFeed News Reporter

Six scientists on Sunday completed a yearlong isolation mission in a geodesic dome that they could only leave while wearing spacesuits.

Scientists emerged on Sunday from the 1,000-square-foot dome on Hawaii's Mauna Loa to a throng of reporters.

The six scientists — Carmel Johnston, Christiane Heinicke, Sheyna E. Gifford, Andrzej Steward, Cyprien Verseux and Tristan Bassingthwaighte — have been in the dome for 12 months to learn about challenges that might face future manned missions to Mars, like managing resources, growing food, and working out conflicts.

Cyprien Verseux @CyprienVerseux Back to Earth tomorrow (Sunday)! See you soon! https://t.co/ThnBAcLRcG #hiseas 08:14 PM - 27 Aug 2016 Reply Retweet Favorite

Just like in deep space, the crew members could only communicate with family and friends via a 20-minute delay and could only leave the dome in an elaborate mock spacesuit.

Christiane Heinicke, who is a German physicist and engineer, said that she was most excited to leave behind the spacesuits.

"The suits do prevent you from hearing and feeling your surroundings," Heinicke said to BuzzFeed News. "No sound of your own steps makes it past the fan noise and every rock feels like the inside of your suit gloves."

Mauna Loa is considered an ideal location for the mission because of its relative remoteness and the terrain, which appears Mars-like with its red, rocky slopes.

The study is funded by NASA and run through the University of Hawaii . It's Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation's fourth mission of its kind, and the longest to date.

When asked what they would do first upon leaving the dome, Heinicke said, "Finally, swimming in the Pacific!"

The program is currently seeking applications for the next two isolation missions, which will send teams back to mock Mars in 2017 and 2018 for eight months each.

Amazing Photos From Hawaii Reveal What It’s Like On A Simulated Mars Mission

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Six Strangers Are Living In A Dome To Prepare For Life On Mars

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Hi-seas team completes 8-month isolation mission, steven siceloff, public affairs specialist.

A team of six volunteer scientists completed one of the most extensive studies of the demands of life on a distant world by closing themselves off to the rest of the world for eight months in an effort known as HI-SEAS. Their chore wasn’t so much to stay alive, but to see how isolation and the lack of privacy in a small group affects social aspects of would-be explorers.

The research is expected to bear directly on NASA’s decisions when composing crews for future missions to Mars. The group also experimented with many budding technologies future Mars explorers could employ during real expeditions to the Red Planet. It was the third and longest of the simulation missions. The next simulation is planned to last a year. A mission to Mars may take two and a half to three years, with approximately half of that time on the planetary surface.

HI-SEAS, short for Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation, took place atop the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii. The site was chosen because it shows little signs of human existence and even plants are scarce at that altitude. In other words, it’s one of the few places on Earth that can offer researchers few of the signs of their home planet without having to leave Earth.

Although social interactions were the primary study area for this mission, the teams had to do without almost all the normal elements of human life on Earth. For instance, they ate only food that was freeze-dried or that would be stable on a long-duration spaceflight. Water and electricity were extremely limited – not just for drinking, but for showering and other uses. They left the habitat once a week to conduct field studies on foot wearing suits akin to those being designed for astronauts on a Mars excursion.

The dome the team used was erected 8,000 feet above sea level and was basically a small, two-story house. The first floor, which covered about 900 square feet, housed the common areas such as lab and shower while the upper level’s 424 square feet housed the staterooms for the participants along with a half-bath. An attached workshop was made from a converted shipping container. The design was tied closely to the amount of space a crew on Mars is likely to have for a habitat.

Project leaders also chose the volcano as a site because its geology offered the crew a place to take samples and conduct field studies once a week outside the habitat. Astronauts on a journey to Mars would do the same thing during their time on the surface, just as the Apollo astronauts did on the moon. Also, the volcanic surface is akin to the Martian soil and is used in many cases to simulate Martian surfaces in other studies.

Noting that there are obvious limits to conducting deep-space simulations on Earth, scientists said there are many aspects that can be suitably studied, principally the crew interactions and how people change how they see others after a long time in one another’s presence. More than just whether or not they get along, a crew’s makeup will dictate how successfully other science is performed during a mission to deep space.

Researchers are excited about the work that was completed during the eight-month mission but will take some time before detailing their findings in academic journals and at technical conferences. In the meantime, they also are prepping for a 1-year mission at the habitat slated to begin in August.

• The Inventory

A NASA-funded, year-long experiment in Hawaii to mimic life on Mars has come to an end

Life on Mars is closer than you think. Six people just lived “there” for a whole year. But today (Aug. 28), the crew of a NASA-funded Mars simulation in Hawaii can finally take off their helmets and return to earth.

NASA hopes to send humans to Mars by 2030. In preparation, HI-SEAS (Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation) is running ”campaigns” made up of several missions to determine the resources, conditions and crew makeup that might make such a trip a success. The latest campaign saw three different gender-balanced crews shut up for four, eight and then 12 months. Their home for that time: a small dome, 8,000 feet (2,400 meters) above sea level, on the rocky plane of the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii, the closest to a Mars habitat that we can get on Earth. The mission that ended today was their longest test yet of the effects of isolation and confined conditions that a three-year-long flight to the red planet would entail.

The latest crew had roles  including  biologist, physicist, architect and “crew journalist.” To mimic life on Mars in their dome, they had limited resources (food arrived every four months, water every two), and they could only communicate with earthlings via emails delayed by 20 minutes, the time necessary for signals to travel to and from Mars. The mock astronauts could leave their yurt-like habitat, but only in puffy, heavy space suits, with limited oxygen.

Thankfully, the crew was not subjected to Big Brother-style camera surveillance, with only formal meetings in the kitchen space recorded on film. However, built-in sensors measured activity levels in different areas. Each member of the crew also wore a sociometer, a pocket radio-like gadget which measured social interactions using data like noise volumes. The crew also had to fill out weekly surveys, and play a  virtual reality game  designed to comfort astronauts who might suffer from loneliness on long missions.

If being locked up with the same six people for an entire year wasn’t enough, the researchers purposely triggered stressful, emergency situations to test group cohesion and performance. For example, they were told a deadly radiation wave was about to hit the planet due to a sudden increase in solar activity, forcing them to take shelter outside the dome in tubes formed out of cooled lava. The crew also had to solve problems which arose naturally, including sudden power blackouts and broken research tools.

Kim Binsted, the project’s principal investigator says it can be particularly challenging for scientists to detect any mental or psychological problems at an early stage in astronauts. ”They are very stoic people,” says Binsted. “They hardly ever complain and are generally very positive people.”

The brain power in the dome—the crew consisted of a physicist, aerospace engineer, soil scientist, architect, physician and an astrobiologist —didn’t prevent arguments similar to what you’d hear in a college dormitory. Binsted says there was plenty of typical bickering about ”who ate the last piece of chocolate, ‘you are chewing too loud’ or when someone didn’t do their share of chores.”

Researchers will now analyze and compare data from the three simulation missions focusing on isolation effects to pinpoint what might fuel problems between crew members on a future trip to Mars. ”There is never going to be a perfect crew. Things will go wrong,” Binsted says. But insight from these experiments might help a crew recover quickly from issues when they arise.

HI-SEAS will now also move on to its next campaigns, which will include two more missions using the dome. The next,  starting in January 2017 , will focus on crew selection, and the ideal makeup of a Mars-bound team. Future missions will also test remote medical treatments for issues like the flu or a broken leg, as well as different recycling systems.

Researchers aren’t sure how many Mars simulations we’ll need before we can embark on an actual trip. Some have also wondered whether it would be wise to run simulations on the Moon and asteroids before attempting the journey.

There are also concerns that politics (and therefore funding) might stand in the way of a trip, more than technology. “If we want to reach Mars as quickly as possible, we have to take into account that the US president changes, at the best, every 8 years,” Binsted says. ”The success behind the Moon mission was they managed to do it under relatively few leaders.” Luckily, politics isn’t likely to be a problem when we touch down on Mars.

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Watch CBS News

NASA scientists complete yearlong trip to "Mars"

August 29, 2016 / 6:50 AM EDT / CBS News

NASA hopes a yearlong experiment that just ended will help reveal what it would be like to send astronauts to Mars.

To prepare for a potential mission in the 2030s, researchers studied six people living like astronauts, in a dome on top of a volcano in Hawaii. Their goal: To study the effects of a potential mission on the human mind.

“Welcome back to Earth!”

An excited crowd gathered Sunday in Hawaii to welcome a six-person crew back to Earth, after they spent a year on Mars -- or, more accurately, after they simulated living a year on Mars.

Correspondent Errol Barnett reports they’ve actually been spending all their time in a solar-powered dome on the side of a volcano in Hawaii, part of the NASA-funded program HI-SEAS .

Last August, the group (including an architect, astrobiologist and aerospace engineer) came from across the globe to live in the nearly 1,500-square-foot dome.

Over the next 12 months , they had limited food and water and used a computer with at least a 20-minute delay to communicate with the outside world. 

“I’m super-excited because it’s the first time we get to be outside without wearing a spacesuit, and everything is different,” said one participant.

It’s the fourth (and longest) time HI-SEAS has performed this type of mission.

From past HI-SEAS projects:

• Volunteers emerge from mock Mars base in Hawaii (CBS News, 07/28/14)
• Spam-fried noodles on Mars? (CBS News, 08/13/13)

The HI-SEAS semi-portable dome habitat features living quarters for six, including kitchen, laboratory, exercise area, and a simulated airlock. A 10kW solar array panel (with a backup hydrogen fuel cell generator) supplies energy.

“A mission to Mars is going to be a complex system of systems,” said Kim Binsted, principal investigator of the project. “Some of those systems are going to be technological, and some of them are going to be human. And it’s just as bad if the human part of the system fails as if a rocket blows up.”

Based on this experiment, the crew is optimistic about travel to Mars. They say they would make the trip themselves if they could.

“I can give you my personal impression, which is that a mission to Mars, in the close future, is realistic,” said HI-SEAS crewmember Cyprien Verseux,

If you don’t want to wait for that day, the University of Hawaiʻi Manoa program is currently accepting applications for next year’s eight-month mission.

This crew’s advice for the next group? Bring a lot of books!

       For more info:

• Hawaiʻi Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS) project ​

More from CBS News

AIR & SPACE MAGAZINE

Living the martian life, in hawaii.

A science experiment simulates what it’s like to live on another planet.

Diane Tedeschi

For a four-month period in 2013, Kate Greene was part of a six-person crew holed up in a geodesic dome on the slopes of the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii. She and the others had been selected by NASA to participate in the Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS), a research project simulating a human outpost on Mars. Greene’s new book, Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars , is a wonderfully honest account of what future travelers to Mars can expect. Greene spoke with Air & Space senior associate editor Diane Tedeschi in October.

Air & Space : Why did you decide to write this book?

Greene: I knew I wanted to write a book about the [HI-SEAS] experience, but this book? This book came out of the need to address the ideas, conversations, and feelings that kept coming up around the mission in the years after. Big topics—isolation, boredom, the astronaut body—kept swirling around in my head until I had to get them out.

How well did HI-SEAS simulate a long-term space mission?

Making a perfectly realistic simulation of a long-term space mission is prohibitively expensive—from the construction of a habitat to the spacesuit simulators to the food [for the crew]. Plus, it’s unknown exactly the kinds of facility and equipment that would be required. HI-SEAS had to pick and choose its verisimilitude with the goal of maximizing a sense of isolation, since the project was conceived as a testbed for psychological research on the individual and team effects of isolation. This meant a remote location was important, and so was putting limits on resources available to the crew, including water and electricity.

Crucially, there was a lack of real-time communication—up to 20 minutes one way for an email—and no real-time internet, though we could request downloads from mission support. We also couldn’t go outside unless we wore a kind of spacesuit that was actually a retrofitted hazmat suit. They were cumbersome, like the real-thing, but not pressurized or particularly high-fidelity in any other way. And of course we had to follow various operational protocols and write reports, fill out surveys and conduct experiments, and do chores to keep the place clean and livable—the kinds of activities that happen on any NASA space mission.

Did the isolation affect you in ways you had expected?

Before the mission, we’d discussed the known challenges of isolation: getting irritated by fellow crewmates, generalized boredom, and losing trust in people who weren’t inside the experiment with us—because how could they possibly understand what we were going through? What was so interesting to me is we had talked about how we didn’t think these things would be a problem because we knew about them. Well, they didn’t wreck the mission, but they all still happened!

What was the worst thing about living on Mars? What was the best thing?

The whole experience was actually not terrible, and I look back on it fondly. But if I have to identify a worst thing—and historically this answer has varied depending on my mood and circumstance—I’d say it was the lack of freedom of movement and limited in-person socializing, much like what many people are experiencing now in America during this pandemic. You couldn’t go any further away from the hab than you could walk. And it was just you and your five crewmates in conversation for four months.

The best thing for me was actually multiple. I enjoyed getting to know my crewmates and having the opportunity to live in a completely different way than I had before. I mean, NASA literally gave us permission to, as adults, pretend to live on Mars—like a kid dream come true. I also cherished both the mental break from a real-time internet and from not having to buy anything for four months since all our supplies were provided from the outset.

After you left the dome, was it easy to pick up where you had left off in the real world?

I had a period of adjustment for sure. It was hard to be away from my wife for four months, and in some ways we both had to relearn how to live in the same space with each other again. Out in public, loud noises easily startled me. In social situations, I felt more awkward than before. On the bright side, though, I’d never enjoyed the beauty of the Earth as much as I did when I first came back. I rode my bike to the neighborhood beer garden, swam in the ocean, took hikes through the redwoods. All the things you could never do if you actually lived on Mars.

After the mission was complete, did you get any feedback from NASA?

The HI-SEAS project lasted for five years and collected a lot of data for a lot of different researchers and research projects. I don’t know the specific outcomes of the experiments we took part in, but I do know that before HI-SEAS, most analog missions were a one-off (there was no way to directly compare outcomes from multiple long-term simulated missions), but HI-SEAS was the first to offer a testbed for that. Also, I’ve learned that data around the crew selection process from the missions that followed ours (the process wasn’t as formalized for us) has been extremely useful to NASA in fine-tuning their selection of actual astronauts. And finally, and maybe most exciting for human space research, all the HI-SEAS data will be made available so anyone can analyze it.

Have you seen an accurate sci-fi depiction of human space exploration?

I did enjoy The Martian . Right after the mission, I read the book and was amazed at how right Andy Weir got many of the technical and psychological challenges. Claire Denis’ High Life with Robert Pattinson is an interesting recent take on a deep-space mission. It was about a crew of death-row inmates traveling at some percentage of the speed of light toward a black hole. Like the film’s fictional crew, we also had a sense of obligation to the data-collection process. We were serving the science—it was the reason we were there. High Life is a bleak and beautiful film, and I think Denis captured the feeling of being truly cut off from humanity really, really well.

What was your favorite thing to eat during your HI-SEAS experience?

We usually ate all our meals together, and we had a number of amazing, delicious dishes. I was particularly impressed with the egg powder—OvaEasy—that was supplied to us. On Sunday mornings, when we were on our own for food, I would come down to the kitchen, often by myself, and make a simple omelet with rehydrated cheddar cheese and dried parsley flakes. A cracker with powdered butter and jam and a mug of Earl Grey—a lovely, recurrent memory.

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Diane Tedeschi | READ MORE

Diane Tedeschi is a Senior Associate Editor at Air & Space.

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The Two-Way

5th 'mars mission' simulation ready for launch in hawaii.

Rebecca Hersher

A solar-powered dome sits on the side of Hawaii's Mauna Loa volcano is part of an experiment in Mars-like living. University of Hawaii News hide caption

A solar-powered dome sits on the side of Hawaii's Mauna Loa volcano is part of an experiment in Mars-like living.

Later today, six people will enter a dome on a volcano in Hawaii that will be their home for the next eight months, as they simulate a future mission to Mars.

It is the fifth such experiment run by the University of Hawaii and funded by NASA. The latest mission on Mauna Loa, which ended in August 2016, lasted a full year. It is known as the Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation, or HI-SEAS .

The goal of HI-SEAS is to test what it would be like for people to live on Mars, and what the project designers call "team performance and cohesion" — or how a group of strangers might handle being stuck together for months on end.

'Mars Mission' Crew Emerges From Yearlong Simulation In Hawaii

"It could be a long trip to Mars despite recent bold assurances of faster rocket ships, or a long stay on the Martian surface," a summary of the mission states . "In either case, astronaut crews far from Earth will rely on a social resilience and team cohesion previously untested in deep space."

The new crew is made up of two women and four men — five American engineers and scientists and one British researcher — who were chosen from a pool of "astronaut-like" candidates.

Like previous missions, the crew's assignment is primarily behavioral — the team is trying to figure out how to handle social interactions and psychological burdens associated with being isolated with a small group of people.

Are Humans Really Headed To Mars Anytime Soon?

Unlike previous missions, the ability of crew members to make decisions on their own, without direction from "earth," will vary over the course of the eight months they spend living in the dome. The HI-SEAS team hopes to study how different amounts of "control of their daily schedule and planning of crew involvement in mission tasks" affect group cohesion, according to the mission summary.

Asked what advice she'd give to future would-be Mars inhabitants, former crew member and German physicist Christiane Heinicke said, "Bring something to work on. Something meaningful to work on. One of your biggest enemies is boredom."

"The other big enemies, of course, are the rest of the crew," she said, laughing in a video posted to Twitter, as The Two-Way reported .

As for what she learned about how to cope with living and working with the same five people all the time, Heinicke said emergencies play a surprising role in helping people get along.

At one point, for example, the system for gathering and treating water broke. To simulate life on Mars, the team received water and food only every two and four months, respectively. "Obviously, we need water, so we all needed to work on that as a group," Heinicke recalled.

"If you had some arguments within the group ... it really helps to have an emergency to work on together, because everyone has new motivation," she said.

NASA Completes Year-Long Mars Simulation In Hawaii

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August 29, 2016

Year-long Mars isolation experiment in Hawaii ends

Six people who were isolated on a remote site in Hawaii for one year to help NASA plan for a mission to Mars emerged from their dome Sunday, happy to breathe fresh air and meet new people.

The team was based on the barren northern slope of the Mauna Loa volcano, and spent their time inside a dome 36 feet (11 meters) in diameter and 20 feet tall.

The experiment shows that "a mission to Mars in the close future is realistic," said French astrobiologist Cyprien Verseux in a Periscope interview by organizers posted on Twitter.

"The technical and psychological problems can be overcome," he said.

Video footage of the team as they emerged shows the three men and three women looking a bit bewildered as they met and posed for selfies with visitors and well-wishers. Organizers gave them fresh fruit and vegetables.

The most challenging aspect of the experiment was the monotony—"we were always in the same place, always with the same people", Verseux said.

His advice to new volunteers on a similar isolation experiment: "Bring books."

Another mission member, American Tristan Bassingthwaighte, agreed, urging future participants to bring "lots of books."

Salsa, antidote to boredom

Bassingthwaighte said that team members engaged in hobbies such as salsa dancing and playing the ukelele to stave off the boredom.

"If you can work on something that is self developmental... you will not go crazy," he said.

Team members could venture outside only in spacesuits, and Bassingthwaighte said that the 'astronauts' removed a vast amount of garbage from the flanks of the volcano in their excursions.

Christiane Heinicke from Germany said that her main experiment was extracting water from the ground - and the volcanic soil on Mauna Loa is very similar in mineral composition to the Martian soil.

"You can actually get water from a ground that is seemingly dry," she told the organizers in a video also on Periscope. "The implication is that you could get water from Mars."

The crew also included a pilot, a doctor/journalist and a soil scientist.

The dome was located in an abandoned quarry far from animals and vegetation. The team locked themselves in on August 28, 2015.

The men and women had their own small rooms, with space for a sleeping cot and desk, and spent their days eating food like powdered cheese and canned tuna.

The dome had composting toilets and showers, and was powered by solar energy. Team members had limited Internet access.

NASA can currently send a robot to the Red Planet in eight months, but astronauts traveling to Mars face a trip lasting between one and three years.

NASA is studying how these long-term isolation scenarios play out on Earth—in a program called Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS)—before pressing on toward Mars, which the US 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.

Two more HI-SEAS missions are planned starting in January 2017 and 2018. Both are scheduled to last eight months, and organizers are already looking for volunteers.

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