After simulated ‘living on Mars’ for 378, NASA crew ‘returns to Earth’

Colonising Mars and settling humans on the Red Planet has been a long-standing dream of not just Elon Musk, but also space agencies around the world. However, due to its inhospitable nature, to date, no space agencies have been able to send humans to Mars, let alone colonise it.

NASA

Studying how body will react to living on Mars

But they are still working on it and are confident that one day humans will step foot on our neighboring planet. The US space agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), has been at the forefront of such missions and even launched a program to study how the human body will react to living on Mars.

Also read: Time Traveller From Future Says We Will Be Living On Mars By The Year 2028

NASA

CHAPEA mission 

The first Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog (CHAPEA) mission was launched on June 25, 2023, at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. For the experimental mission, four crew members—Kelly Haston, Ross Brockwell, Nathan Jones, and Anca Selariu—lived in a large simulated environment of Mars for over a year.

NASA

Living on Mars for one year

They lived inside Mars Dune Alpha, a 1,700-square-foot area that was designed to simulate the type of structure that would be built on a mission to Mars. To make the Martian conditions realistic, the crew even had to go through a 22-minute delay in communications, which is the amount of time it takes for a message from Earth to reach Mars.

Also read: NASA Successfully Produces Oxygen On Mars, Paving Way For Human Exploration

NASA

CHAPEA crew to exit  

Now, after living in the Mars simulator for 378 days, the crew is set to ‘return to Earth.’ The CHAPEA crew will exit the simulator on Saturday, July 6.

NASA

“We’re really looking at how the crew performance and health changes based on realistic Mars restrictions and the lifestyle of the crew members. So the lifestyle is what we’re trying to simulate by setting up a realistic environment and workload for the CHAPEA crew,” NASA said in a statement.

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