Six scientists have completed a yearlong Mars simulation in Hawaii, where they lived in a dome in near isolation.
The group lived in the dome on a Mauna Loa mountain in Hawaii and were only allowed to go outside if wearing spacesuits. These types of studies are essential for NASA to understand how teams of astronauts will perform on long-duration space exploration missions, such as those required for human travel to Mars.
HI-SEAS crew member Tristan Bassingthwaighte said "The UH research going on up here is just super vital when it comes to picking crews, figuring out how people are going to actually work on different kinds of missions, and sort of the human factors element of space travel, colonization, whatever it is you are actually looking at".
The crew left the habitat around 3 p.m.
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The place is ideal for studying the conditions for Mars because the landscape is nearly similar to the Martian soil, with hardly any vegetation to be found. The aim is to create guidelines for future Mars missions in the United States human space program.
Kim Binsted, principal investigator for the HI-SEAS, told the Hawaii Tribune Herald newspaper that the only longer Mars simulation was held in Russian Federation and lasted 520 days.
During the experiment, participants were nearly entirely self-sufficient, using a limited supply of food and other necessities. Any communications between the crew and the outside world experiences a 20-minute delay, to mimic the limitations of communicating with deep space locations.
The crew members said they faced several challenges, including the necessity of rationing limited resources and a plumbing malfunction that left them bathing with buckets for two weeks. HI-SEAS will send teams to the mock habitat in 2017 and 2018 for eight months at a time.
