Why Hawaii is an important staging-post to a successful Mars mission

German scientist Christiane Heinicke is currently living in a dome-shaped building on a barren Hawaiian volcano, mimicking the life of an astronaut on Mars, as part of a NASA-funded test of team cohesion in space. 

She and five others have been in the dome since 28 August and when they leave a full year later, they will have set a US record for a study of the effects of isolation and confinement.

The purpose of the research study, known as Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation, or Hi-Seas for short, is to determine what is required to keep a space flight crew content and healthy during a long mission to Mars. When astronauts finally make the historic trip years from now — both NASA and the European Space Agency talk about human missions at some point in the 2030s — it will be a long, reclusive journey: about nine months to the red planet, and then another nine months home.

“Sending humans to Mars will not be cheap and there are still a number of problems that need to be solved,” said Heinicke, a postdoctoral researcher at Finland’s Aalto University.

Not least the question of whether humans are cut out for the stress of such a long mission. By living for a year as imitation astronauts, Heinicke and her crew mates are the space industry’s guinea pigs.

“We take part in many surveys about our personality, our mood, and events of the day,” Heinicke told Science|Business via email from her seclusion in the dome. “We also take part in a couple of social experiments that are repeated throughout the mission to see how our group changes over the year in isolation.”

This is the fourth Mars simulation project led by NASA. The previous one, which lasted eight months and also included six people, ended in June.

Altogether the data will tell NASA a lot about crew compatibility, as well as inform careful habitat design on Mars-bound spaceships.

In creating the Mars experience, the researchers behind the study have been as literal as possible. The six crew members will live on a diet of freeze-dried space food and keep in touch with ‘mission control’ – the principal investigator and her team – only by computer, with an artificial time lag in each direction to simulate communication from Mars. If Heinicke or her housemates leave the dome to perform small mapping activities of the surrounding area, they have to wear spacesuits.

Close encounters

The team comprises three men and three women – a French astrobiologist and four Americans including an architect, journalist, pilot and soil scientist. Throughout their time in the dome, their cognitive, social and emotional factors will be monitored with cameras and body movement trackers.

How do you prepare for a year of living in close quarters with people, in a dome without fresh air or food, surrounded by invasive technology? “I don't think one can,” replied Heinicke.

“Of course, we did prepare ourselves as a group, we hiked together, and we discussed scenarios that we are likely to experience during the mission, for example receiving bad news from home or our behaviour when we're having a bad day. Apart from that it's hard to wrap your head around the idea of being isolated for one year.”

“I think the hardest parts are going to be the lack of privacy and having to maintain a good working relationship even when conflicts occur. We do have our own rooms, but unless you spend all day in them, there is very little space to avoid each other. Conflicts happen, the challenge is to deal with them in a mature way and to maintain a happy, cohesive group.”

So far however, everyone is getting along. “We have plenty of things to do: our own projects, the social experiments we participate in, preparing and conducting extra-vehicular activities, cooking, blogging... For the little time that remains, we brought movies. We are also learning how to dance and languages. Really, it will be hard to be bored here,” Heinicke said.

Beyond keeping psychological and interpersonal problems to a minimum, Heinicke says there is a raft of other issues mission commanders will have to confront before contemplating Mars.

“One major problem is the huge amount of weight we would currently need to send, so anything to reduce that would be a great project,” she said. “Producing fuel for the return trip to Earth from Martian soil would be a good way to save weight, too. Also, we would need a good radiation protection [the planet has almost no atmosphere] in order to get astronauts to Mars healthy.”

Whether Heinicke will be part of any of this is hard to say – she calls herself the one least aspiring to be an astronaut from the group.

“My motivation to take part in this study is curiosity. I wanted to see what happens when a small group is isolated from the rest of humanity and its normal surroundings,” she said.