Humans still haven’t been to Mars, but four NASA volunteers now know what it’s like to spend more than a year in a Mars simulation.
The CHAPEA team (Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog) were isolated in a 3D-printed unit at the Johnson Space Center. They emerged from their habitat on Saturday, July 6.
Suzanne Bell is lead for NASA’s Behavioral Health and Performance Laboratory at the Johnson Space Center. Texas Standard spoke with her before the mission started last year, and now we’re checking back.
Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity.
Texas Standard: I know that you went into this with a sense of what would define success for this mission. Did you achieve it?
Suzanne Bell: Absolutely. The mission was an incredible success.
So we were able to have a crew of four in isolation for 378 days living in, as you put it, a world that was designed to really simulate and replicate what we expect from a Mars surface habitat mission.
So we were able to have a tremendous amount of data from a crew that was astronaut-like and able to remain intact for that entire time. So it’s been a tremendous success. We’re really thrilled with the project.
A CHAPEA crew member participates in a simulated “Marswalk” inside the 1,200-square-foot sandbox, which is filled with red sand to mimic the Martian landscape. (NASA/CHAPEA crew)
Tell us a little bit about the size of this 3D-printed world that they were living in for more than a year.
It’s about 1,700 square feet. And it has living and working areas as well as four private chambers, very small bedrooms.
Still within an isolation bubble, but there is an external environment that we created that has the Martian surface. So the crew was able to do extravehicular activities in the Martian surface and have an airlock to get out to it. And then we were able to extend that greatly with virtual reality. They were able to go on treadmills and do up to six-hour traverses across the Martian surface.
Did you have cameras on them like “Big Brother,” the TV show? Looking in on what was going on?
Yeah, we utilized cameras – both for safety purposes, but also for some data collection. Maybe not exactly like “Big Brother,” but, you know, we collected data in all sorts of ways, including audio-visual, stool samples, blood draws and everything from surveys to proximity markers.
So we have a tremendously high data yield with lots of different looks at the way people live and work in that type of environment.
So what surprised you as you peered in on what was going on?
Well, “surprise” is an interesting word, because I think there were so many unknowns. When you have a truly Mars-restricted resource environment, what are the challenges? We’re still looking at the data.
I think what’s clear at just a high level is that there are things that might be unexpected about things like the extreme communication delay. So, for example, we simulated that when the distance between Earth and Mars is up to 22 minutes, we actually simulated that, right? It’s a paradigm shift to really have a crew of four fairly autonomously execute all these things, whether EVAs, or exercise or, you know, just even figuring out their food patterns.
And so one of the things that I think will be really insightful is understanding when does autonomy need to be supported and how are they best supported? And when do they reach back? And teaching them how to reach back for information both from mission control, but then also to their family and friends.
Inside the habitat, the CHAPEA mission 1 crew harvested tomatoes. (NASA/CHAPEA crew)
Food – I mean, you have to have enough for this entire mission. Were you actually sneaking some in during the course of this year?
No. No candy bars under the door. But that was one of the major resource restrictions that we tried to replicate. So one of the complicated things about going to Mars is that you will likely have to pre-position food.
Right now, on the International Space Station, we can acknowledge some crew preferences in what we send for our crew to eat. They can also get resource resupply with care packages and kind of get little bursts of fresh fruit and things like that. We’re not expecting that that would happen on Mars other than whatever crops can be grown.
And so, what we were doing is replicating as if the food had been pre-positioned and that the crew had no choice in what they were able to eat. Now, they might have chosen, you know, on a daily basis out of a selection. So I’m not sure that at every minute they had to eat exactly something.
How did this limited selection go over with the participants?
Well, you know, that’s some of the data we’re collecting.
So, you know, we look at anything from how that affects them and how they are reacting to that, both in terms of their preferences and ability. But we also look at what they eat. And we also look at all their biological data.
Nutrition and that sort of thing.
Yeah, absolutely. Nutrition, immunology, these are all co-investigators on the project that are really looking at the data, too. And so we’ll be able to tell you a lot more as we look at the data. But it’s been thrilling to get the data that we’ve gotten.
And we had very high data yields, which is how much data. So if we wanted to collect, you know, 20,000 data points and were able to get 19,000, for example, it’s just a wild success like that. Those aren’t our exact numbers for the data but the point is it’s thousands of data points. And we got most of the data that we wanted.
So it’s just a success, because we’ll be able to look at that and really learn.
It’s my understanding this is the first of three simulated missions. Any tweaks before the next one?
Well, we’ve purposely designed them to be very similar. When this project was designed at the outset, it was designed to have three yearlong missions. And so we’ve actually already had the plan in place for what mission two and mission three would look like.
So right now, we’re just currently selecting the crew for mission two. So the patterns that we’re seeing we can understand are those anomalies of a particular individual or crew, or what are the kind of universal challenges that are experienced by people in that type of environment.
The CHAPEA crew is “back on Earth” after their 378-day mission inside the simulated Martian habitat. (NASA /Josh Valcarcel)
Are volunteer positions open to the public at large for the simulation? Or do you have to be an astronaut already approved by NASA and all that?
So our application process for mission two is closed. We’re in some of the more advanced selection stages where we have distilled down 4,000 applications.
They are chosen to be astronaut-like. So these are not current NASA astronauts. However, if you look at the current crew, for example, that just came out, they all have advanced STEM degrees. One’s a medical doctor, one’s an engineer. They have advanced and very substantial careers – brilliant people, team players, the similar things that we have in the astronaut corps and that we look for in astronauts.
I know you’ve had a chance to do a little bit of debriefing. You mentioned the communications delay of more than 20 minutes. Was that the chief obstacle that you noticed? Or did you identify anything else that could be an even greater challenge?
Oh, absolutely.
So, we are still in our debriefing period, but just at a high level, I think that people might appreciate how difficult it is to live in a long-term, isolated, more sensory-deprived type environment for an extended period of time.
We might have thought, “oh, during COVID lockdown, we had this or had to live this.” But you still could go outside, you still see the daylight, you still can real-time Zoom with people. It’s quite a different experience to stay with the same four people in an environment where you’re not seeing Earth’s light and day – you’re not feeling the wind on your face. You’re not getting to do whatever you do for exercise, like swim or go out and have your latte or whatever it is someone has in their daily routine.
And so it is a significant challenge to live in that type of environment. It’s really an unprecedented challenge to humans. And beyond that, a small team of four who will not only have to get along and support each other through this very taxing environment, but also be able to thrive and really do these complex feats.
But just the success of being able to maintain an intact crew for this extended period of time and then walking out, looking well and having smiles on their faces – is significant.
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