Isolated NASA Team Ends Year-Long Mars Simulation In Hawaii (bbc.com) 176
An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes the BBC:
A team of six people have completed a Mars simulation in Hawaii, where they lived in near isolation for a year. Since August 29th, 2015, the group lived in close quarters in a dome, without fresh air, fresh food or privacy... Having survived their year in isolation, the crew members said they were confident a mission to Mars could succeed. "I can give you my personal impression which is that a mission to Mars in the close future is realistic," Cyprien Verseux, a crew member from France, told journalists. "I think the technological and psychological obstacles can be overcome."
The team consisted of a French astro-biologist, a German physicist and four Americans -- a pilot, an architect, a journalist and a soil scientist... the six had to live with limited resources, wear a space-suit when outside the dome, and work to avoid personal conflicts. They each had a small sleeping cot and a desk inside their rooms. Provisions included powdered cheese and canned tuna.
The team consisted of a French astro-biologist, a German physicist and four Americans -- a pilot, an architect, a journalist and a soil scientist... the six had to live with limited resources, wear a space-suit when outside the dome, and work to avoid personal conflicts. They each had a small sleeping cot and a desk inside their rooms. Provisions included powdered cheese and canned tuna.
Provisions (Score:1)
Provisions included powdered cheese and canned tuna.
And the knowledge that if anything went wrong the "experiment" could be ended in a matter of minutes.
Re:Provisions (Score:5, Insightful)
Provisions included powdered cheese and canned tuna.
And the knowledge that if anything went wrong the "experiment" could be ended in a matter of minutes.
If you do the test with all the risks of the real mission you might just as well do the real mission.
The point of a test like this is to make sure that you didn't forget to pack something, not to do the real mission without accomplishing anything.
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How simulations work [Re:Provisions] (Score:2)
Provisions included powdered cheese and canned tuna.
And the knowledge that if anything went wrong the "experiment" could be ended in a matter of minutes.
This is true of every simulation, of course. When a pilot flies a Boeing 777 simulator, they don't die if the simulator crashes. When the army does wargame exercises, the red team doesn't die when their side gets bombed. That's why they're called "simulations".
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Someone modded me Troll? Seriously, you don't think that knowing the experiment can be ended makes a huge difference in the subjects' stress level?
As mentioned elsewhere here, sailors in any ocean voyage prior to the early 20th century, or some of the early Arctic or Antarctic explorations are far better examples. Even in recent times a long ocean voyage can drive a person crazy [wikipedia.org]
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Yes, there was a 20 minute delay on communications with the outside world. I believe they were also only provided with whatever entertainment they brought along with them, no new stuff brought in.
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Yes, there was a 20 minute delay on communications with the outside world. I believe they were also only provided with whatever entertainment they brought along with them, no new stuff brought in.
Not hard to imagine that NASA did that part properly. It's very simple: Nothing in, nothing out.
OTOH I wonder if they put a large source of ionizing radiation in the roof.
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They didn't care enough to vary the communication delay to match orbital positions?
Re:Provisions (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know why entertainment would have to be that limited. A mars mission is going to have a radio link. Even at that distance, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has a connection peaking at 2Mbit/s under good conditions, and a manned ship could carry a larger receive antenna and more powerful transmitter. That's enough to send ebooks, audiobooks, music, and even TV programs and movies. They might have to wait a few days for the latest movies and TV though, as it would have to be a low-priority task when the transmitter isn't needed for more important things.
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That's actually quite impressive, I hadn't thought about that.
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Or they could just take along a few hard drives. With modern storage you can cram a lot of entertainment onto a pair of 8TB drives, and by the time the ship is built there will be much larger drives available. Sufficient to hold enough entertainment to last many years. The most difficult part would be copyright negotiations. I don't think any copyright lawyers have had to negotiate interplanetary distribution rights before.
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Once you get out past the pollution of earth orbit, space is pretty empty. There's just practically nothing to hit in the interplanetary void. Radiation, however, would be an issue. The only way to protect against that is with a lot of mass, and that's very expensive. The astronauts, assuming they got back alive, would have substantially reduced life expectancy on earth.
The technology to go to mars exists right now. It would just be ridiculously expensive. The technology to colonise mars almost exists now t
Little publicity [Re:Provisions] (Score:2)
Hey don't knock it. This experiment didn't accomplish anything that will get us any closer to Mars. But it did accomplish its primary goal of getting NASA a week of good PR.
Since pretty much nobody-- outside of a few people who are already space fans-- has paid any attention at all to this, due to almost no NASA publicity whatsoever, I don't think that this was a major goal.
I'm not sure why they just ran the simulation for 1 year, though. It typically takes about 1.4 years for the planetary alignment needed for a return.
Eh, was this necessary? (Score:5, Interesting)
Was this really necessary? We've had people on ISS go on for almost a year, the Russians made a ground-based test lasting for a year an a half and if you want to go to even harder simulations of solitary missions, we've had many Slashdot members go on for years isolated in front of a screen (let's call it mars spaceship control center) without fresh water or fresh food (only carbonated sodas and reheated pizza)... right there in their mom's basement. And actually many of them were in a ground-braking 2-level simulation, as they were simulating a mission to mars through KSP at the same time!
Re:Eh, was this necessary? (Score:5, Funny)
You do understand that the point is that those people should come out without debilitating psychological disorders, right?
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Also, we expect some level of productivity / social value our of our astronauts.
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... or you may find out the people best adapted to a Mars mission are people with characteristics which are seen as socially debilitating.
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Somehow I suspect a half-dozen socially debilitated people forced to live together in a single small habitat for a year or three with no real options for escape or privacy would *not* turn out well...
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Depends on the nature of the "disability". We judge disability by how well people function in society as it currently exists. It doesn't mean that they can't function in an artificially engineered society (e.g. one consisting of autistic spectrum people).
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Depends on the nature of the "disability". We judge disability by how well people function in society as it currently exists. It doesn't mean that they can't function in an artificially engineered society (e.g. one consisting of autistic spectrum people).
And just think of the great parties they'd throw!
Re:Eh, was this necessary? (Score:5, Insightful)
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I think the support team voted down that idea as not realistic enough. Support team's job being to monitor wave and bikini activities at all the beaches to ensure the safety and isolation of the crew.
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Re:Eh, was this necessary? (Score:4, Interesting)
It's a good analogy, but on a boat you at least have open-air - and even if you don't jump overboard and take a swim for a year, you could if you really wanted to.
I think a nuclear submarine is a better analogy, though they (and long boat trips) tend to have much larger crews and more living space.
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I think a nuclear submarine is a better analogy, though they (and long boat trips) tend to have much larger crews and more living space.
NASA keeps designing Apollo over and over again. They're not even relevant anymore. Missions to Mars will be groups of up to 100 people [wikipedia.org] preceded by approximately 2.5 million pounds of gear and supplies in cargo-only launches. Elon Musk is not planning on boots-and-flags missions. Elon Musk is not planning on a rinky-dink under-provisioned, ill-informed Plymouth Rock-style expedition that can barely do more than sit and starve. Elon Musk is planning on building a fully reusable heavy launch vehicle that
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I'm thinking we want to deliver our astronauts to Mars in slightly better physical and mental condition than c1830s slaves and steerage passengers on ocean voyages to the penal colony.
NASA doesn't allow flogging (Score:2)
Plus the 16-19th century was full of many time long term boat trips in confined spaces.
Where officers were allowed to flog the crew to maintain order and work performance, even the occasional hanging of the truly unruly. I expect NASA wants a more relaxed environment.
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Well, it depends on what your research objectives are. ISS is in some ways a better model, in some ways a worse one. It's better in that it's in space with microgravity, but ISS crew members rotate in and out. Even if individuals spend the equivalent time of a Mars mission on the ISS there will be new faces, a constantly changing research workload, and the ever-changing panorama of the Earth below.
So it's not a very accurate model of the social dynamics of a Mars mission where people are cooped up in a ca
Phase 2 testing (Score:5, Interesting)
Now they need to try again underwater. Have to deal with pressurization issues of the living areas, a truly hostile environment outside, and of course the conscious realization on the part of the team that if things go wrong they go really wrong. Just adding in the additional stress of knowing there is a good possibility of dying if things go wrong could really change the psychological affects of the isolation and could cause real problems as more time is spent in isolation.
Of course, it should go without saying to make sure that, should this kind of study be done, make sure the team down there stays away from any perfectly spherical objects they might run across. That tends to lead to bad outcomes in underwater habitats.
They should go through some ship's journals (Score:2)
Plenty of
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Submarine crews do almost that on a regular base
True, but they don't stay submerged for months on end. They surface occasionally, make port calls, and can be resupplied easier than a fixed facility on the ocean floor. And even then trained submariners start getting a little stressed out towards the end of their deployments (which from what I can find generally run around 6-months).
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SSBN. USS Kamehameha (SSBN-642) had, as its normal mission "Sail out of harbor, submerge, make circles in the ocean for the two+ months of the patrol, surface, go back into port".
Yes, I was part of her crew. So, yes, I know for a fact that we went out, submerged, and stayed that way. No port calls, no surfacing, no resupply. Just make holes in the ocean till the patrol was done.
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USS Kamehameha (SSBN-642) had, as its normal mission "Sail out of harbor, submerge, make circles in the ocean for the two+ months of the patrol, surface, go back into port".
Cool. Now do the same thing 6 more times, without resurfacing.
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Cool. Now do the same thing 6 more times, without resurfacing.
If he can do it for two months straight around the clock without snapping, my money would be on him doing two years too if he had to/wanted to. Elizabeth Fritzl [wikipedia.org] did 24 years trapped in a cell in the basement, eventually no matter how bad the situation is it eventually just is. Same goes for people with severe disabilities and such, if I ended up in a wheelchair I'd get very depressed right away. But if I live through that first phase I don't see myself saying I've lived a year in a wheelchair but a year and
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Patrol times were limited by space available for food, not because the Navy thought crews couldn't deal with longer trips.
For longer patrols (which occasionally happened when your partner boat wasn't available for one reason or another), it wasn't unusual for the crew to be walking on cases of canned food until they'd eaten enough to clear the passages.
Note, by the by, that Triton's submerged circumnavigation of the world would NOT have qualified as a "longer patrol".
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SSBN. USS Kamehameha (SSBN-642) had, as its normal mission "Sail out of harbor, submerge, make circles in the ocean for the two+ months of the patrol, surface, go back into port".
Yes, I was part of her crew. So, yes, I know for a fact that we went out, submerged, and stayed that way. No port calls, no surfacing, no resupply. Just make holes in the ocean till the patrol was done.
And after those 2+ months of constant patrolling didn't you have a few months on land while another crew took over the boat?
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Nuclear missile submarines do stay submerged for months on end. That's kind of the point - they exist specifically to prevent satellites from being able to fix their position.
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Nuclear missile submarines do stay submerged for months on end. That's kind of the point - they exist specifically to prevent satellites from being able to fix their position.
Don't most ballistic missile subs have 2 crews? They go out for 2-3 month straight, come back, then refit, swap crews, and go right back out.
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Ballistic missile subs maintain their entire deployments underwater and make zero port calls since the point of them is for them to hide, frequently under pack ice, for that entire period of time. If they come up for air, or make any sort of port call, they can be found and tracked more easily by those who would want to put a torpedo up their ass before they could launch their missiles. They're not going to come up even to periscope depth very often, if at all, and then only for a short period of time for
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Actually, Everest or Antartica would be far colder for most practical purposes. Yes, Mars is technically much colder, but the air is thinner than the insulation in a vacuum thermos, so there's essentially zero thermal transfer except into the ground, which is easy enough to insulate against. Go exert yourself outside in an uninsulated (except for the soles of your feet) pressure suit, and just like in an orbital EVA overheating will be your problem, not the cold.
MMMM Powdered Cheese (Score:5, Funny)
So I am fully qualified for a mission to mars?
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Depends on your method of ingestion of said cheese. Inhalation through the nose is a red flag.
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That's what I was thinking. It's like grad school.
low-danger volunteer selection bias (Score:5, Interesting)
One of the participants said his reason for volunteering for the mission was the great opportunity to "act like an astronaut for a year." I think the motivation and psyche profile of dangerous-mission astronauts is likely to be very different.
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Except that there is also selection bias when it comes to real Astronauts. Indeed, they do NOT want a random sampling. That would be pretty terrible.
The experiment isn't perfect. Ideally, we'd also have a set of ~10 groups all going at once. But it's close enough to be useful. And a sample size of one still tells us something. And I imagine anything they ran into within the last year and documented will be referenced by psychologists in various papers for decades to come.
Missed opportunity (Score:5, Insightful)
What they should have done was to inform them on day 355 that their mission was being unexpectedly extended for 26 additional months and gauge their reaction.
Re:Missed opportunity (Score:4, Funny)
Let's not be needlessly cruel here. They're only going to Mars, not deploying to Iraq.
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If they want this to be taken seriously as a simulated Mars mission, it should have been considerably longer - two to three years. With current propulsion technology, travel time alone could exceed a year, before you add in time actually spent on Mars exploring (and waiting for a favourable launch window to return).
Maybe they just figure that getting funding for an ultra-expensive, inefficient, all-chemical propulsion mission is politically impossible, anyway? (As it should be.)
Still, even with a high delta
Submarines (Score:4, Interesting)
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Where's the nuclear sub with a crew of only 6, living space that small, and mission duration of >11 months?
We're all stuck on this planet together, indefinitely, and that goes wrong often enough - things change with scale.
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Experience in subs IS useful, but your normal SSN or SSBN is very populated, and significantly better supplied than any Mars-bound ship is going to be.
And if worst comes to worst, you can at least sometimes surface a sub that is in real trouble.
More to the point, it is significantly more expensive to run this test in an actual submarine that it would be to have it in a building in Hawaii.
Folks, when we're closer to the technical hurdles being figured out, we probably will have the Antarctic training and/or
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Nuclear submariners do this all the time.
When was the last time a nuclear submarine went on a two-year mission without shore leave or resupply, or even without surfacing?
Just to Clarify (Score:5, Informative)
"Just to clarify, we don’t have cheese powder. To whoever said that we live on tuna and cheese powder we have freeze dried cheese that rehydrates into delicious real cheese. Not to mention our numerous homemade cheese and yogurt cultures (Haans, Phil, Geno) and sourdough starter (Bob). Yes, we have tuna, but it’s wild caught and comes in virgin olive oil. We also have FD chicken (my favorite!), ham, turkey, and many kinds of beef. There is an abundant supply of dehydrated/FD carrots, onions, tomatoes, peas, corn, celery, potato, berries, peaches (mine, mine, mine, mine), bananas, apples, and cherries. We eat the same foods as people who cook their meals and don’t eat takeout"
The concept here... (Score:4, Insightful)
Whereas people are making valid points about the flaws in this experiment, I don't think anyone at NASA thinks that this is a perfect dress rehearsal. It's about baby steps.
You can bring in the real-life high paid astronauts, build expensive underwater, or Himalayan bases, give them less sense of security, etc later.
If you think this is the only experiment that will happen you're mistaken, they're going to run similar tests numerous times. This experiment was about watching just basic psychology- start with a few factors, add some more, see the differences. See what causes the breaking point that would lead to a failed mission and try to alleviate it.
Many people here are programmers. You don't write an entire program in its entirety and then test it. You build chunks and test them as you go along. This was step one.
Stopped reading... (Score:2)
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I gotta admit, I was thinking the same thing. Y'know, Hawaii, Mars, very similar places.
Don't get me wrong--the people involved in the experiment are indoors. So it didn't really matter where it was.
That said, "Why Hawaii?" It sounds like some researcher decided he wanted to spend a year in Hawaii. "Yeah, we're testing psychological reactions. Give me money to live in Hawaii for a year."
stinky (Score:2)
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tf7IEVTDjng [youtube.com]
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> If you don't take a Hollywood shower,
Wet skin. Lather soap. Rinse.
If you really had to shower daily (which is nice in close quarters but not exactly required to sustain life), you could get by on maybe 30 seconds of water.
If you have a system to instantly recycle the shower water for the 'wet' part, you could use the entire 30 seconds for the 'rinse'.
No word on fats and keto (Score:3)
Virtual Privacy? (Score:2)
I wonder if VR might help with the privacy issue.
While you wouldn't actually be distanced from everyone else, a VR headset and noise cancelling headphones might be enough to get the feeling of having time to yourself.
Obvious question: (Score:2)
Did they have powdered toast to put their powdered cheese on?
Why the hell in HAWAII? (Score:3)
Nothing at all like Mars: check.
Fails to be in any way convenient for researchers and "support" projects: check
Justifies a lot of people going to Hawaii paid for by the US taxpayer: check
Well, I guess that's clear enough.
Just joking, honey (Score:2)
So basically, like being married with kids.
I'm thinking the Red Dwarf theme song here. (Score:2)
Drinking fresh mango juice
Gold fish shoals
Nibbling at my toes
Just because, Hawaii.
Re: Tuna!!! (Score:2, Funny)
Next Time pack along some surstrÃmming.
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It said it 'included' powdered cheese and canned tuna. It could of also had literally anything else.
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As part of the strict scientific nature of this rigorous experiment to get us closer to a manned mission to Mars, participants were limited to only ordering pizza no more than once a day, and only allowed to leave the facility when they couldn't find a sitter and on family movie night. They were also under strict orders to pretend the gravity was two-thirds lower.
Food needs to be excellent on long missions ... (Score:2)
I think the Navy's experience with submarine crews would be most relevant, food needs to be excellent to prevent morale problems when isolated from the world for months at a time.
Re:Worst part... (Score:4, Funny)
It said it 'included' powdered cheese and canned tuna. It could of also had literally anything else.
They counted themselves lucky. The previous simulation included canned cheese and powered tuna.
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They had other things too, though they were mostly kinda crappy because they had to be shelf-stable for at least a year without refrigeration, which translates to a lot of powdered and freeze dried foods (though they did grow some fresh vegetables to supplement). Here's a blog entry about the food [walking-on-red-dust.com] from Cyprien Verseux's blog. The six legged reconstituted freeze dried turkey is both innovative and horrifying.
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The GERMan.
(ba-dum-tis)
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You're expecting the first missions to Mars to not include any logistics or planning for the astronauts' return? Because that's what your post sounds like.
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That depends if China gets there first.
It's not that unreasonable a proposal. Removing the return trip would hugely reduce the cost of the mission, and there are plenty of volunteers who would still go even knowing their life expectancy would be no more than a few years. Better to die young serving mankind and advancing scientific knowledge than to lead an unremarkable life and die forgotten in the retirement home.
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Who said they could? The very least I'd have had them sign is a paper saying that you don't get out alive before we say so, and it's going to be a year. Give or take.
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No, for that they'd have to do it in Russia.
But outside of life threatening problems, there is zero reason for them to not only know when it ends but also to not be allowed to leave.
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So have the Chineese run the test in secret? NASA is far to risk adverse.
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The Chinese are working on a Moon landing right now, where they don't need to run the year long test yet.
And why rush it? The Americans doing the test first means that they can get all of the information they need that much more easily when it comes time for them to actually go to Mars.
While it is too bad for them that the Chinese never had the chance to land on the Moon first, the bright side is that since China hasn't done anything first, they're under no pressure except internal expectations about getti
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You get a good test of if the resources you planned to take with you
If by resources you mean "food" then this is a problem that has been solved since sailors discovered oranges prevented scurvy. I would be much more interested in a biodome experiment where they actually tried to keep a closed system going. I wouldn't even mind if they "cheated" and vented or used compressed air or other resources to regulate it as long as they tracked exactly how much outside resources were actually used. This would be useful data. How good are we at keeping the environment at the corre
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It must be exhausting to be a person who assumes he can do everybody's jobs better than they can. Even more exhausting to know such a person.
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Why would they have to rely completely on the plants themselves to replenish the oxygen? We've had carbon scrubbing substances for some time now, like lithium hydroxide and calcium carbonate. What the plants can't create themselves, they can supplement with technology.
Could we do it right now? Probably not. But they could come up with a system that works.
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They tried that before, and it seems the soil itself ate too much Oxygen to be replenished by the plants inside the dome
That was kindof my point. This is an area where we need more research. We do it on submarines and the space station but they are very small and constantly venting and replenishing. Not just for space research but for sustainability of earth, we need to understand how the earth replinishes its oxygen.
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You have a point, although there would be a weight limit on board, which means that a non-reproducing method of scrubbing could only be used until it ran out. With plants, your goal is to bring something small that can use local resources to reproduce and grow its population into a system that could replace the synthetic scrubbing material when it ran out.
Of course, for that to work, they need to find some way to make actual fertile soil from what is on Mars, because the amount of usable soil itself is a b
Re: The only problem is chemistry at DeVry (Score:2)
How would calcium carbonate scrub carbon [dioxide]? By forming calcium evenmorecarbonate?
In any case, scrubbing and oxygen production are two different things.
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The airlock is RIGHT THERE.
It's only an airlock if you're in space or underwater. In this case it was just a door.
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The airlock is RIGHT THERE.
It's only an airlock if you're in space or underwater. In this case it was just a door.
I would imagine they have an actual air lock; the air you want to protect is the air inside the spaceship. I've even seen buildings in cold environments which have a small anteroom so when the door opens only a small amount of temperature-controlled air is lost. For space, the airlock can even suction the air off before opening the outside doors meaning near-zero air loss.
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It may well be that someone walking out a door on Earth might come down to someone walking out an airlock in space. Or someone getting murdered in space.
The door on Earth allows the pressure to be relieved prematurely, but be aware that if we can't sustain a mission on Earth where there is no danger, how are we going to sustain one in a craft that has to get to Mars?
Sure, they may not be able to escape, but the strain could seriously degrade their efficiency to the point where the mission fails. And I wou
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This was a psychological and operations test, so talking about the conditions of space actually misses the point.
The reality is that they aren't going to have to care about the gravity or the ionizing radiation. If they notice any radiation on their trip, it will either be dealt with by an operational task they could practice on Earth, or they will have sustained damage and be in serious danger.... and hopefully have an operations checklist to deal with the problem.
As for being in Hawaii, it's certainly no
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A suicide mission may get volunteers, and it may scientifically "succeed" but will not be accepted by the general public.
It would start as an exciting adventure and end as a death watch. I'd rather let the Chinese get there "first" than have the US do that. I'd rather be the country that got people there and back again than the be ones who produced Mars' first corpses on purpose.
Re:Most important question (Score:4, Funny)
Same way they do in the park. Provided they have trench coats, that is.
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Why Hawaii? Mars is not a tropical romper room.
Go look at the photos in the linked article: the astronauts in this test were stationed at high altitude, above the tree line in a desolate landscape of volcanic rock. It's fairly cold up there, despite being close to the equator.
Nowhere on Earth is actually similar to Mars, but the spot NASA chose is better than most. (Of course, I'm sure the support staff enjoyed the tropical climate found below.)