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In Hawaii, a 6-Person Crew Begins a Year-Long Mars Isolation Experiment
The BBC reports that six volunteers have begun a planned year-long stint "without fresh air, fresh food or privacy" in a NASA simulation of what life might be like for a group of Mars colonists. The volunteers are to spend the next 12 months in the dome (11 meters in diameter, 6 meters high), except for space-suited out-of-dome excursions, where they will eat space-style meals, sleep on tiny cots, and keep up a science schedule. The current mission is the fourth (and longest yet) from the Hawai'i Space Exploration Analog and Simulation; you can read more about this mission's crew here.
Because this will be unlike Biosphere 2 how?
http://wunc.org/post/what-less...
They should have done it under water, if they insisted on Hawaii instead of Antarctica, which would have been a better choice (or at altitude on K2 or Everest, as long as it was a non-permanent installation). There's too much temptation to cheat, there's no real danger, and we already know that curing concrete will eat all your CO2 if you are stupid and don't seal it.
The only good choice fora Hawaii location other than "under water" would be "Inside a large SO2 cloud near a volcano, so that breathing the external atmosphere would get you dead".
You might make an argument that a significant difference exists between inmates in a prison and highly tested, analyzed and trained astronauts with regard to their psychological makeup not to mention willingness and motivation to be confined.
I do think that long term encapsulation is probably psychologically burdensome at best and perhaps damaging to even the best possible astronauts.
Which makes me wonder how much NASA has thought about the psychopharmacology of space travel. There might be some benefit to some kind of sedating anti-depressant for stages of a long voyage that required just routine status checks and basic routine maintenance duties.