Mock Mars Space Mission To Launch In Hawaii

A team of scientists and engineers is ready to start on an eight-month mock mission to study how humans behave and interact while living in Mars-like conditions. Funded by NASA, this will be the fifth Mars mock mission for the Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS).

The goal of HI-SEAS is to simulate the state of living on long-duration space exploration missions, such as the journey to the Red Planet. The mock mission will be conducted by making the groups of volunteers stay inside a dome-shaped habitat for a long duration, stretching over eight months. Additionally, the crew will have no contact with the rest of the world and will be isolated.

The HI-SEAS Mission V will start off in Hawaii at around 3:30 p.m. local time on Jan. 19. The volunteers will live and work inside the geodesic dome located on the Mauna Loa volcano in the main island of Hawaii.

"Since 2012, HI-SEAS has been contributing to NASA's plans for long-duration space exploration," said Kim Binsted, principal investigator at HI-SEAS, according to the University of Hawaiʻi System News. "We are an international collaboration of crew, researchers and mission support, and I am proud of the part we play in helping reduce the barriers to a human journey to Mars."

The tasks that the crew will undertake will include performing outdoor exploration tasks like life systems management and geological fieldwork. The team of volunteers will also be dressed in spacesuits whenever they step outside their habitat, just like they would do on Mars. The mock mission will include eight primary and three opportunistic research studies, according to Space.com.

Some of the daily activities that the group has to participate in will include routine exercises and make food, wherein the meals will be similar to the dried food that astronauts consume in space. The team, comprising of six members, will also simulate contact between Mars and Earth via a 20-minute delay in communication between them and mission control.