Living on Mars wasn’t exactly a childhood dream for Canadian biologist Kelly Haston, though she’ll soon spend a year preparing for just that.
Living on Mars wasn’t exactly a childhood dream for Canadian biologist Kelly Haston, though she’ll soon spend a year preparing for just that.
“We are just going to pretend that we’re there,” the 52-year-old told AFP, summing up her participation in an exercise simulating a long stay on the Red Planet.
At the end of June, she will be one of the four volunteers stepping into a Martian habitat in Houston, Texas that will be their home for the next 12 months.
“It still sometimes seems a bit unreal to me,” she laughs.
For NASA, which has carefully selected the participants, these long-term experiments make it possible to evaluate the behavior of a crew in an isolated and confined environment, ahead of a real mission in future.
Participants will face equipment failures and water limitations, the space agency has warned—as well as some “surprises,” according to Haston.
Their communications with the outside world will suffer from the delays that exist between Earth and Mars—up to 20 minutes one-way, depending on the planets’ positions—and 40 minutes two ways.
“I’m very excited about this, but I’m also realistic for what the challenge is,” says the research scientist, whose status as a permanent resident of the United States made her eligible for the program.
The habitat, dubbed Mars Dune Alpha, is a 3D printed 1,700 square-foot (160 square-meter) facility, complete with bedrooms, a gym, common areas, and a vertical farm to grow food.
