After 365 days, the longest mission in project history, six science crew members exited from their Mars simulation habitat on slopes of Mauna Loa on Hawaii Island Sunday.
The crew lived in isolation in a geodesic, solar-powered dome set in a Mars-like environment at approximately 8,200 feet above sea level as part of the University of Hawaii at Manoa’s fourth Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation, or HI-SEAS, project.
The research project was focused on long-duration space exploration and crew performance.
HI-SEAS researchers worked to develop effective team composition and support strategies that will allow crews to successfully travel to Mars and back, an estimated three-year journey.
“The longer each mission becomes, the better we can understand the risks of space travel,” said Kim Binsted, HI-SEAS principal investigator and UH Manoa professor from the Department of Information and Computer Sciences. “We hope that this upcoming mission will build on our current understanding of the social and psychological factors involved in long duration space exploration and give NASA solid data on how best to select and support a flight crew that will work cohesively as a team while in space.”
HI-SEAS crew member Tristan Bassingthwaighte said “The UH research going on up here is just super vital when it comes to picking crews, figuring out how people are going to actually work on different kinds of missions, and sort of the human factors element of space travel, colonization, whatever it is you are actually looking at.”
