A team of scientists has emerged from an eight-month stay in an isolation dome built to simulate conditions on Mars.
The "crew" has been living inside the dome -- located 8,000 feet up dormant volcano Mauna Loa -- since November 2014 as part of the Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS) Mission 3, a human performance study funded by Nasa,
Participants have been completely cut off from the outside world, save for communications on a 20-minute delay designed to mimic the expected lag between Earth and a Mars-bound spacecraft. Their departure from the 36-foot-wide dome was also the first time they'd been allowed to leave without wearing a space suit during their stay.
Throughout the duration, the crew has been tracked by surveillance cameras and body-movement sensors in order to monitor how they worked together as a team. The dome's remote volcanic location, eerie silence and simulated airlock was designed to reconstruct a space-like atmosphere.
By tracking the crew members' performance and emotional responses during the project, Nasa hopes to help astronauts deal with communication issues, or personal problems such as stress or depression, on future missions.
Kim Binsted, a professor at the University of Hawaii and principal investigator of the study, said: "Astronauts are very stoic people, very level-headed, and there's a certain hesitancy to report problems."
She continued: "So this is a way for people on the ground to detect cohesion-related problems before they become a real issue."
Crewmembers relieved stress during their confined stay by doing yoga and team workouts, and using a solar-powered treadmill on sunny days. However, other conditions were not so forgiving, including showers limited to just six minutes per week and a diet consisting largely of freeze-dried meals.
On leaving the dome on Saturday, Jocelyn Dunn, a doctoral student at Purdue University, Indiana, expressed her relief at being in the fresh air again -- and said she couldn't wait to go for a swim. "To be able to just submerge myself in water for as long as I want, to feel the Sun, will be amazing. I feel like a ghost."
The HI-SEAS experiment is over for now. But it is by no means the first of its kind in recent history. Here are a few others, designed to test the limits of human endurance in preparation for longterm space travel:
The Mars500 project
Back in 2010-11, the European Space Agency carried out a simulated human space flight at the Institute of Biomedical Problems (IMBP) in Moscow. Six crew members were locked away in steel tubes to find out how the human mind and body would cope on a mission to Mars. At a total duration of 18 months, it's the longest experiment of its kind carried out so far. The findings revealed that isolation, stress, confinement and unusual levels of light all had a big impact on the participants' body clocks; their body temperatures alone dropped by an average of 0.4 degrees celsius during the experiment.
Mars One colony project
In 2014, Mars One announced an ambitious project to send volunteers on a one-way colony trip to Mars, and began searching for locations on which to build simulation outposts on Earth. If all goes to plan, the first settlements will depart for Mars by 2026.
The Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS)
The Mars Research Society has used the Utah desert's Mars-like terrain to build several "exploration habitats", enabling scientists to work, study and live together in conditions that mimic the Red Planet's own. Bacteria and algae from the surrounding desert are commonly studied. Some of these soil and vapour samples have been found to have signs of viable methanogens -- microorganisms that produce methane.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
