Nasa careers in houston7/1/2023 ![]() ![]() She also plans on using meditation to deal with anxiety.Ĭhapea builds on previous Mars-like experiments, including the NASA-funded Hi-SEAS simulation on the northern slope of the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii. For many people, it’s proven to be extremely stressful, and it has generated forms of psychological maladies that were unanticipated at the outset of the pandemic,” he says.įor her part, Haston plans to bring along videos of familiar places and audio recordings of sounds and music that have meaning for her, anticipating the unsettling lack of sound in the simulated Mars environment. During Covid “we’ve been denied the normal social interactions that we’ve learned to depend on. They’ll still be more isolated than normal, however, like many of us were during the early days of Covid-19. The situations aren’t the same, of course: While the Chapea bedrooms are similar in size to a solitary confinement cell, the crew also has other spaces for activities-and they have each other. Haney has documented the debilitating and sometimes permanent effects of isolation on prisoners-effects that can emerge in just a couple weeks. “NASA is right to study this, because what we’ve learned is that social isolation is a very dangerous psychological toxin,” says Craig Haney, a UC Santa Cruz psychologist who researches solitary confinement. While the accommodations look nice, the relative isolation might affect crew members over time, and it’s important to see how they fare. Their bathrooms have a shower, toilet, and sink with running water-a big improvement over life in microgravity-though the water for each crew member will be rationed, as there will be very limited water available on Mars. The kitchen’s equipped with a small oven and a fridge, and they’ll have to rely on reconstituted dehydrated food between limited batches of fresh food delivered by infrequent cargo resupply missions. (People will feel lighter and bouncier on Mars, which is smaller and less massive than Earth, but that’s hard to simulate.) During the crew’s work hours, they’ll conduct mission operations, like the “Mars walks,” growing plants, getting exercise, cleaning the habitat, and maintaining equipment. In many ways, their day-to-day life will be similar to that of astronauts aboard the International Space Station, just with a bit more space and no floating. While the idea of throwing four people into a single structure for a long time and seeing how they fare sounds kind of like a reality TV show, the crew will be disciplined, and they’ll have tasks to complete. Each week, they will have multiple opportunities to go outside for “Mars walks”-while wearing spacesuits. Like real visitors to Mars, they’ll see only a stark, lifeless landscape, which NASA is simulating with an enclosed space covered with Martian mural images and a 1,200-square-foot sandbox filled with red sand. They’ll be able to communicate with mission control, but with a 20-minute delay, as if they were in fact some 100 million miles away from home. Just like the first batch of Martian astronauts, Haston and her crewmates-Ross Brockwell, Nathan Jones, and Alyssa Shannon-will live in a cramped space without contact with other people. We’re volunteers, so there is an exit sign. It sounds doable, but it actually will be very hard,” says Kelly Haston, the mission’s biomedical researcher and commander. “If we get to the end of the year and the crew is complete and we haven’t had any attrition, that would be, for me, a huge thing. NASA hopes that lessons from this unique social experiment could aid future astronauts when they really do set foot on the ruddy Martian dirt-such as learning how the space agency can make the crew comfortable and help them get along with each other, or deal with loneliness or homesickness. The program is called Chapea, which stands for Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog. ![]()
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