"But we're also restricting the crew to a spaceflight food system. "What CHAPEA is really about is Mars-realistic conditions in terms of resource restrictions, so isolation confined with the living space being one of them," said Bell. Haston, Brockwell, Jones and Selariu will not only have to survive living together for more than a year, but also adjust to some of the same changes that a crew on Mars would face. NASA did not provide an explanation for the change. Selariu was originally selected to be a back-up crew member, but replaced Alyssa Shannon, an advanced practice nurse, prior to the mission starting. Jones is the medical officer, pulling on his experience an emergency medicine physician, and Selariu, a microbiologist in the U.S. Brockwell, a structural engineer, is the crew's flight engineer. Haston, a research scientist studying human disease, is the mission's commander. They also had to pass the same physical and psychological testing as astronaut candidates to ensure they were fit for the program. The crew was selected to be "astronaut-like," according to Bell, with a requirement that they have a degree in one of the STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) fields, as well as professional experience in their chosen field, piloting experience or military training. Click to enlarge video in new pop-up window. And then we collect data at other analogs, too, with varying lengths, but this will be three, over one yearlong missions, which is a really great extended isolation."ĬHAPEA Mission 1 crew ingress. "We also do analogs in something called HERA, the Human Exploration Research Analog, and our missions there have been 45 days. "To me, this is really exciting because one of the things that's different than some of our previous analogs at NASA is people will be in isolation as a crew for 378 days," Suzanne Bell, lead for NASA's Behavioral Health and Performance Laboratory at Johnson Space Center, said in an interview with collectSPACE. They will not leave the 3D-printed structure - other than to conduct the occasional Mars-walk within an adjoining 1,200-square-foot (111-square-meter), enclosed Mars "sandbox" - until Sunday, July 7, 2024. Mission 1 gets underway tonight (June 25) as the four volunteers enter the 1,700-square-foot (158-square-meter) habitat, known as "Mars Dune Alpha," at 7:30 p.m. As the first of three planned Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog, or CHAPEA, crews, Haston, Brockwell, Jones and Selariu will help inform the space agency how to better design and plan for future human missions on the real Martian surface. Not that the four "analog astronauts" are leaving the planet, but for the next 12 months they will live inside a mock Mars base located at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, where they will be remotely observed and studied by scientists. The next time that Kelly Haston, Ross Brockwell, Nathan Jones and Anca Selariu will see blue sky, a year will have gone by on Earth.
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