Watch Volunteers Emerge After Living One Year in a Mars Simulation (engadget.com) 47
They lived 378 days in a "mock Mars habitat" in Houston, reports Engadget. But today the four volunteers for NASA's yearlong simulation will finally emerge from their 1,700-square-foot habitat at the Johnson Space Center that was 3D-printed from materials that could be created with Martian soil.
And you can watch the "welcome home" ceremony's livestream starting at 5 p.m. EST on NASA TV (also embedded in Engadget's story). More det ails from NASA: For more than a year, the crew simulated Mars mission operations, including "Marswalks," grew and harvested several vegetables to supplement their shelf-stable food, maintained their equipment and habitat, and operated under additional stressors a Mars crew will experience, including communication delays with Earth, resource limitations, and isolation.
One of the mission's crew members told the Houston Chronicle they were "very excited to go back to 'Earth,' but of course there is a bittersweet aspect to it just like any time you reach the completion of something that has dominated one's life for several years."
Various crew members left behind their children or long-term partner for this once-in-a-lifetime experience, according to an earlier article, which also notes that NASA is paying the participants $10 per hour "for all waking hours, up to 16 hours per day. That's as much as $60,480 for the 378-day mission."
Engadget points out there are already plans for two more one-year "missions" — with the second one expected to begin next spring...
I'm curious. Would any Slashdot readers be willing to spend a year in a mock Mars habitat?
And you can watch the "welcome home" ceremony's livestream starting at 5 p.m. EST on NASA TV (also embedded in Engadget's story). More det ails from NASA: For more than a year, the crew simulated Mars mission operations, including "Marswalks," grew and harvested several vegetables to supplement their shelf-stable food, maintained their equipment and habitat, and operated under additional stressors a Mars crew will experience, including communication delays with Earth, resource limitations, and isolation.
One of the mission's crew members told the Houston Chronicle they were "very excited to go back to 'Earth,' but of course there is a bittersweet aspect to it just like any time you reach the completion of something that has dominated one's life for several years."
Various crew members left behind their children or long-term partner for this once-in-a-lifetime experience, according to an earlier article, which also notes that NASA is paying the participants $10 per hour "for all waking hours, up to 16 hours per day. That's as much as $60,480 for the 378-day mission."
Engadget points out there are already plans for two more one-year "missions" — with the second one expected to begin next spring...
I'm curious. Would any Slashdot readers be willing to spend a year in a mock Mars habitat?
Slashdotters (Score:2, Troll)
I can definitely think of a few we should send to Mars, without internet access.
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I can definitely think of a few we should send to Mars, without internet access.
Please feel free to lead the way!
I'm curious. Would any Slashdot readers be willing to spend a year in a mock Mars habitat?
so no for me, too much delay on shells accessed with ssh for me to be able to work productively, otherwise I probably wouldn't care that much...
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I can definitely think of a few we should send to Mars, without internet access.
Let's start with Elon Musk
If the staff ... (Score:5, Funny)
Re: If the staff ... (Score:3)
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Trump is going to win the election
So, the orangutan.
Not with a simulation (Score:1)
Seems redundant / pointless (Score:2)
We already have the FMARS project, it seems it has this stuff covered and then some. Not sure why putting people in a massive habitat in Houston is better than putting them in a more likely to be deployed small one... and the FMARS project is on Devon Island in Canada. It's about as close to Mars as you can get on this planet without finding a bare bit of land in Antarctica.
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You can ignore the air pressure, and the difference in day length is not terribly important - we already have plenty of sleep studies that have identified how flexible the human circadian rhythm is, and Mars is within those limits.
I don't know if FMARS bothers, but you can also fake the light colour and intensity with tinted visors (and port holes if any on the hab).
If you really wanted to, you could fake the toxic dust. I wouldn't recommend this.
What you can't fake is gravity and large scale geology. Hou
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I call it massive compared to some of the claustrophobic nightmares usually suggested for these things. Who is going to ship that much usable hab volume to Mars?
Even here on Earth, three people in 160m^2 is down right comfortable luxury if you're not a clutterbug, and I wouldn't have any trouble fitting a small workshop and a hydroponics garden in that and STILL having at least one standard-sized room's worth of area I never needed to bother with. In my house, if you took out the dining room and living ro
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Re:Seems redundant / pointless (Score:4, Informative)
Massive? 1700 sqft (160 m2) seems small to me.
The space per person is massive compared to what submarine crews routinely endure.
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Because for > 90% of the stuff, they could ask the US Navy on how they pick, train and handle crews for their nuclear submarines and deal with various real world situations.
The US Navy has been doing tons of real world "isolation" missions. Those subs have secret tech and usually have nuclear weapons. So their missions are at least as critical and weighty as planting vegetables on M
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Since we can't alter gravity here on Earth there's only one way to get the gravity/biology interaction data you're complaining about not having; that's to go somewhere with a lower gravity. When we do some of the people will get sick, some will die, and considering the environment (or lack of same) that they're surrounded by many will be killed/disabled in accidents. Unfortunately today's culture finds that unacceptable.
My ancestors spent weeks packed like sardines into a leaking, stinking, creaking woode
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Mars? Definitely agree. The moon on the other hand is a useful location to colonize. Gravity is low enough that a space elevator or mass driver can launch all the way into orbit without requiring new physics or unobtanium, but there's enough gravity that plumbing, ventilation and refining will all work as expected. and it's far enough away from Earth that boosting to anywhere else in the solar system is cheap and easy but close enough that resupply or rescue from Earth is not unreasonable. Besides, we n
Additional data is always good (Score:1)
We already have the FMARS project, it seems it has this stuff covered and then some.
It might be redundant but I think all of the data we can get on this is helpful. I'll bet the FMARS people would agree.
Not sure why putting people in a massive habitat in Houston is better than putting them in a more likely to be deployed small one...
I think Musk has plans for pretty large habitats and will probably be shipping over some Boring Company tunnelers to help create spaces.
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"I think Musk has plans for pretty large habitats"
which he'll downscale at some point when reality starts to set in.
He started out in 2018 saying the trip to Mars would have to be fun, can't feel cramped or be boring.
Five years later? "It'll be cramped, difficult, very hard work, you might die or won't be coming back"
SIGN ME UP & TAKE MY MONEY!!
"will probably be shipping over some Boring Company tunnelers to help create spaces"
that's some heavy payload to transport, especially from Earth's surface. may
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"that's some heavy payload to transport,"
And that is why Starship exists which can lift 100-150t to orbit [spacex.com] (and beyond).
Some things will probably be built on mars buy I think some heavy equipment to help dig and put up structures will be in the first loads to go over.
It could well be they have smaller tunnelers in mind to send over. The free radiation shielding you get with tunnels makes it pretty inevitable they will be heavily used.
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"And that is why Starship exists which can lift 100-150t to orbit [spacex.com] (and beyond)"
Get back to us when they've managed to transport that much to the Moon.
Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa got tired of SpaceX delays on doing just a flight *around* it and cancelled his dearMoon project after a 6 year wait
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Pauly Shore (Score:2)
Gravity? (Score:2)
How did they simulate the 1/3 gravity?
Their families? (Score:1)
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Or preferred it.
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If they were your typical teenagers, they may not have even noticed.
and in 20-30 years they'll say they were neglected, that the parents were always away working
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I will die on this hill (Score:3)
And you can watch the "welcome home" ceremony's livestream starting at 5 p.m. EST
EDT ... why is this so hard.
Low Pay (Score:3)
The $60k for more than a year of work seems weirdly low considering what must have been the cost of the experiment. I suspect they were using the low salary to reduce the size of the applicant pool since so many people would have applied. But since the mental state is a big part of the experiment I think it would have made more sense to pay more and get some people with educational and career backgrounds similar to what you'd expect the mars crew to have.
For instance, why not use some actual astronauts? Not all of them get to go up in space, but some should certainly be willing to take a pay bump to do a simulation experiment.
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There's a substantial pool of people with impressive resumes willing to do something like this. Money doesn't motivate everyone the same way.
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There's a substantial pool of people with impressive resumes willing to do something like this. Money doesn't motivate everyone the same way.
You're not just filtering for people not doing it for the money, you're filtering for people who are either not making much, or who are willing to take a substantial pay cut.
Honestly I think there might have been a couple things going on.
1) The best test would have been with astronauts (the actual folks who would go). That NASA didn't use astronauts tells me they didn't take the test that seriously, it was more a PR stunt / proof of concept.
2) Given they weren't using astronauts NASA wanted folks who would
Biosphere II was bigger but less food (Score:2)
So much more work to be done on the flying can (Score:2)