On January 19, 2017, six scientists began their Mars simulation, preparing to live inside a 1,200 square feet vinyl-covered dome for the next eight months.

The University of Hawaii is being funded by NASA to conduct the fifth ‘Mars mission’ simulation. Four men and two women will be completely isolated from society. They will even have a 20-minute delay in communications with their support crew to account for the time it would take an email to reach Earth from Mars. The group is composed of engineers, a doctoral candidate, a computer scientist, and a biomedical expert. The purpose of this mission, Campaign 3, is to address the IRP issue; “Risk of Performance Decrements Due to Inadequate Cooperation, Coordination, Communication, and Psycho-Social Adaption within a Team”. A new change in this mission compared to the past 4 missions is the autonomy will be varied throughout the mission.

HI-SEAS (Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation) is a habitat site located on the Big Island of Hawaii. The site allows qualified researchers to conduct tasks that are geographically similar to those on mars. The habitat is located at an elevation of approximately 8000 ft and experiences minimal weather variations which allow for longer duration missions. The site was previously a cinder rock quarry and is located on the side of a volcano, with relatively recent lava flows and little plant life present.

The purpose of this mission is to evaluate the six scientist’s psychological effects of being in isolated and confinement for an extended period of time. The dome, where eight months will be spent, was built by Blue Planet Foundation of Honolulu. It is a two-story structure with the first floor containing a kitchen, a dining area, a lab, a common work space, and an exercise area. The second floor is the sleeping quarters, with six bedrooms and one bathroom. In addition, it has a 160-square foot shipping container attached to it for a workshop.

Although we are years away from sending astronauts to Mars, these simulations help plan the mission and allow NASA to learn how to compose and support astronauts on a long-duration mission. In the past, HI-SEAS has conducted four successful missions, in hopes of gathering a deeper understanding on food supply and team cohesion.

Mission I

The purpose of this mission was to experiment the IRP gap; Risks associated with an inadequate food system. In this mission, food prepared by the crew from bulk packaging and prepackaged food were both examined for their nutritional values and efficiency for long-term use. This mission lasted four months and was conducted in 2013.

Mission II, III, IV

These missions focused on the crew member’s abilities to perform team tasks and their overall ability to cooperate with each other over an extended period. The differences between these three missions are the amounts of time spent in the HI-SEAS habitat. In campaign 2, they completed one 4-month mission in 2014, one 8-month mission in 2014, and a yearlong mission completed in August of 2016.

In the past the HI-SEAS missions have been successful, apart from an unsuccessful Mars simulation of Biosphere 2. Biosphere 2 was a mission in Oracle, Arizona that began in January 1987 and lasted until September 1991. There were four men and four women who lived in a three-acre greenhouse-like structure. The goal was for the crew to grow all their food and recycle all their waste, water and air. The food was grown in very rich organic soil, which became the leading cause of the experiment’s unsustainability: oxygen levels decreased due to the soil metabolism being too active, causing an excess of carbon dioxide. Although this experiment failed as a sustainable planetary ecosystem analog, it was a very successful in terms of engineering.

To learn more about HI-SEAS, or their missions visit http://hi-seas.org/?page_id=5990