Back from…Mars! – Volunteers experience life on the red planet for a year

A remarkable NASA experiment has come to an end, as four volunteers returned to the Johnson Space Center in Houston after their stay in the alien, artificial environment of Mars.

These are the crew members who spent about 12 months in NASA’s first simulated Mars environment. The four volunteers emerged from the artificial environment around 5 p.m. EST on Saturday, July 7. Kelly Haston, Anza Silario, Ross Brockwell and Nathan Jones will enter the engineered 3D-printed habitat on June 25, 2023, as the first crew of the space agency’s Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog mission.

For more than a year, the crew simulated missions to Mars, including Marswalks, growing lots of vegetables for food, maintaining their equipment, and working under additional stresses that might exist in a real mission situation, such as communication delays with Mars, resource constraints, and isolation.

“Hello,” said Haston, the mission commander, at first, then added, “It’s really nice to be able to say hello to all of you.” Jones, the mission doctor, said the 378 days in confinement “have gone by so fast.”

NASA said two additional CHAPEA missions with similar goals are already planned, and crews will continue to conduct spacewalk simulations and collect data on factors related to physical and mental health.

Much of the first crew’s experiments focused on nutrition and how it affected their performance, said Steve Kerner, associate director of the Johnson Space Center. The project is “critical to science as we prepare to send humans to the Red Planet,” he said.

“They were separated from their families, put on a carefully defined meal plan and closely monitored,” he explained.

“Mars is our goal,” he said, describing the project as an important step in America’s intention to be a leader in the world’s space exploration efforts.

The mission showed him the importance of sustainable living for the benefit of everyone on Earth, said Brockwell, the crew’s flight engineer.

“I am so grateful for this wonderful opportunity to live for a year in the spirit of planetary adventure towards an exciting future, and I am grateful for the opportunity to live the idea that we must use resources faster than they can be used,” he said. “They are being replenished and waste is being produced faster than they can be converted into resources.”

*Information from nasa.gov

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