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Isolated NASA Team Ends Year-Long Mars Simulation In Hawaii (bbc.com)
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.
I thought it didn't sound like that difficult of a scenario to endure, until I read that their food was powdered cheese and canned tuna. If that's all I could eat for a year, cannibalism would start to sound really good.
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!
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Who provided the soil bacteria?
Did they have a sex during this year? :D
Or how men fapped in presence of women
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.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Next Time pack along some surstrÃmming.
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.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
How about connectivity to the outside world? Was there a reasonable simulation of the delay in communications and limited bandwidth, or were they on broadband watching Netflix and video conferencing with their families?
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.
Eat the rich.
So if one of them got a life-threatening injury, they're forced to die there? I don't think so. The LARP session will end and they'd be immediately airlifted to a hospital.
So I am fully qualified for a mission to mars?
-----
Sorry, I'm only a 1336 h4x0r.
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.
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.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
No sig today...
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.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
They can quit on the real mission too. The airlock is RIGHT THERE. Just sayin'...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
For three reasons. One, as many have pointed out, because they knew they were not in real danger. Two, because they were not exposed to the levels of radiation they would on Mars. Three, because the gravity was Earth's, not Mars'. This was an interesting exercise, but it probably allowed NASA to iron out only the easy problems. The difficult ones they will have to face during the actual mission.
The thing is that they're not gonna say no, they'd never say no ... because of the implication.
Nuclear submariners do this all the time. Why is it necessary for NASA to do these 'experiments?
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Plenty of historic reports to pick from, plenty examples of how sailors would (or wouldn't?) cope on such journeys. Never mind that in comparison to an ocean-going vessel, a 'habitat' on some remote island is a pretty controlled environment.
So have the Chineese run the test in secret? NASA is far to risk adverse.
No sir I dont like it.
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 correct levels and how much resources do we need to sustain it. We have a small environment on the space station but I would love to see a 1 acre simulation. To prevent accidental leakage, I would recommend putting it in underwater in shallow water somewhere.
From https://snowballschanceonmars....
"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"
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.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
They didn't care enough to vary the communication delay to match orbital positions?
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.
"Old man yells at systemd"
This story reminds me of the Bio-Dome.
Six people eating powdered cheese and tuna in an airtight container is a recipe for conflict
They got a free year-long trip to Hawaii and spent the entirety of it indoors?
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.
Maybe you should tell NASA about variable length communications delays? I'm sure they NEVER would have thought about that.
...at Hawaii. Really how stupid is this? You chose Hawaii?
They tried that before, and it seems the soil itself ate too much Oxygen to be replenished by the plants inside the dome
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.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Bet they stink
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.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
If you do the test with all the risks of the real mission you might just as well do the real mission.
Even with many of the risks of a real mission, it's still worth doing a dry run to find out what works and what doesn't, while avoiding the COST of a real mission.
Tuna? in Hawaii? They should have been eating Spam like all good Hawaiians do.
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.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
It would be interesting to know if the guys were keto adapted at the end. Fats have more than twice the energy of carbs and carbs for the same volume and weight can be synthesized from protein. So sending proteins and fats only will reduce the volume and weight of food supplies quite a bit. Canned tuna if there was no sugar is actually just that, but powdered protein requires even less storage. I can't find any word on that; does anyone know?
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
Part of the entertainment left for them was the movie "Capricorn one" and they were told that CGI renderings of the crew taking off for mars had been broadcast along with a "godspeed" message from the president.
Nullius in verba
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.
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.
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 big limiting factor for plant growth, even in a facility or under a dome. And that will be hard, because what goes for dirt on Mars right now is a rather nasty material that will not lend itself well to becoming a component of fertile soil.
FWIW, dehydrated food is much better today than when I was a kid decades ago. Of course, everything tastes better when hiking/camping. That may not hold true in lab experiments.
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.
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.
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 getting the job done in any particular way. They don't lose face by being second to have some space achievement because there's no Space Race going on anymore and they are already going to be second or third no matter what they do. At least until they get to the point where they can take Mars seriously.
And I almost hope they ramp up their Mars program, because I think the US needs a kick in the ass to get itself to Mars. My hope is that we've done some good work to get us ahead if it came down to it, but that lead will evaporate VERY quickly if we sit on our ass too long.
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 would not rule out psychotic episodes.
Obviously, this will not show all of the strains of being isolated in a cramped spacecraft with the same people or allow the enforced commitment of being a million miles away surrounded by hard vacuum, but I think if they do add some actual expedition prospects to the test at some point and then said, "you're not going to Mars if you fail out of this test," you'd need to drag them kicking and screaming out of the test enclosure even if they were injured. That's still not the same as being on the spacecraft, but those who are selected for the trip will also be those who will do anything to succeed when they are on their way.
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 not Mars, but again, conditions are irrelevant. They're not testing whether actual Mars procedures work, they're testing whether humans can deal with a regimented task load using certain roughly known requirements (like wearing space suits), and having twenty minute comms delays.
To go to Mars, there is a certain level of tech required, and a certain type of person required. Both need to be tested, and eventually the tech and people need to be tested in increasingly real conditions, and together, but by setting aside the requirements for complete fidelity to conditions, you can do the "people" research in parallel with the tech. Waiting until we have the tech to do the people testing is an inefficiently serial approach that does not need to be taken until a certain point.
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.
That's actually quite impressive, I hadn't thought about that.
Eat the rich.
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
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.
Did they have powdered toast to put their powdered cheese on?
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.
-Styopa
So basically, like being married with kids.
You are welcome on my lawn.
True, but referring strictly to the psychological component, where the crew member said he was confident they could do it, he also had in the back of his head that he wasn't really trapped on a spaceship or planet whose atmosphere -or lack of one- would kill him dead in minutes, so the stress isn't exactly the same. Still, agreed it's a good, necessary step.
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I think the cheese and tuna would probably suffice though. Now you know why they really wore the suits so much of the time.
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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.)
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 too, the only reason no-one is seriously proposing that is because doing so would probably be the single most expensive project in all of human history.
I want to lie, Shipwrecked in-comatose
Drinking fresh mango juice
Gold fish shoals
Nibbling at my toes
Just because, Hawaii.
How would calcium carbonate scrub carbon [dioxide]? By forming calcium evenmorecarbonate?
In any case, scrubbing and oxygen production are two different things.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."