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NASA Ends Year-Long Mars Simulation

posted by CoolHand on Tuesday August 30 2016, @11:17PM   Printer-friendly
from the looking-for-little-green-men dept.

cubancigar11 writes:

The BBC reports that the year-long simulation of near isolation in preparation for a trip to Mars, has ended successfully.

A team of six people have completed a Mars simulation in Hawaii, where they lived in near isolation for a year.

Since 29 August 2015, the group lived in close quarters in a dome, without fresh air, fresh food or privacy.

[...] The Nasa-funded study run by the University of Hawaii is the longest of its kind since a Russian mission that lasted 520 days.

Having survived their year in isolation, the crew members said they were confident a mission to Mars could succeed.

"I can give you my personal impression which is that a mission to Mars in the close future is realistic," Cyprien Verseux, a crew member from France, told journalists. "I think the technological and psychological obstacles can be overcome."

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  • (Score: 2) by JNCF on Wednesday August 31 2016, @12:12AM

    by JNCF (4317) on Wednesday August 31 2016, @12:12AM (#395516) Journal

    The other big question: gravity. It would be more or less fine for the length of the NASA mission (assuming NASA is really getting their people back out of that gravity well) but SpaceX is talking about leaving people on Mars. I'm really looking forward to Musk's colonization speech later this year, where we're supposed to hear more about his plans. I'm extremely ignorant on this topic, but I think that's more-or-less true of everyone. Can a fetus really develop in Martian gravity? If not, do the pregnant women sleep in spinning tubes? Are the babies going to be grown in spinning vats? Is the colony indefinitely dependant on new blood? I'm looking forward to answers.

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  • (Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 31 2016, @12:25AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 31 2016, @12:25AM (#395517)

    Martian women must be impregnated by potent Musky sperm. Regular sperm has no chance to survive. It's going to be a Musk colony, literally.

  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 31 2016, @01:25AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 31 2016, @01:25AM (#395540)

    Here's a link. [stackexchange.com]

    Basically, we don't really know about Martian gravity in particular, but we do know that microgravity generally does have significant effects on fetal development based on experiments on mice and rats in microgravity.

    There was some research done on embryonic development of mice and rats in microgravity, both impregnated females sent to orbit and later recovered (mostly onboard Space Shuttle, but Russians also sent in orbit similar experiments), and even more frequently by using 3D clinostat to simulate microgravity via continuous three-dimensional rotation. Reduced number of successful full-term pregnancies was observed for females exposed to microgravity during early pregnancy, while fewer abnormal pregnancies for those exposed later. Findings suggest that embryonic stem cells have problems developing normally under microgravity conditions during early pregnancy and result in abnormal fetal development and terminated pregnancy.