Four volunteers have left a windowless NASA habitat in Houston, Texas, after spending more than a year simulating life on Mars. Ross Elder, Matthew Montgomery, James Spicer and Ellen Ellis emerged from the Mars Dune Alpha facility after 378 days, completing the second mission of NASA's Chapea program. Live images from the space agency showed the crew leaving the site to applause and cheers.
The four spent more than twelve months inside the roughly 160-square-meter habitat, which was built with the help of a 3D printer. During the mission they were not allowed to leave the site. They grew plants, maintained the living quarters and machinery, and exercised, with all routines modeled on the demands of life on the Martian surface. They also carried out simulated outdoor missions in a small exterior area.
Communication with family and friends was possible, but only on what the crew called Mars time. Even a short text message took about 22 minutes to send. Spicer said he received roughly 4,000 emails from relatives and friends, which he described as a lifeline during the experiment. Elder said the crew was honored to contribute to a project that the agency hopes will eventually send the first humans to Mars. Spicer joked that they were eager to see the sun and, depending on the forecast, perhaps a strong rain shower. Ellis said she was most looking forward to hugging her husband.
The participants were not trained NASA astronauts. Applicants had to be between 30 and 55 years old, healthy and motivated, non-smokers, and hold US citizenship or permanent residency, a degree in a natural science, and at least 1,000 flight hours. Sleeping cells on the site measure about two by three meters and are complemented by a shared living room with a television and armchairs, work stations with computers, and a medical bay.
The Chapea program, short for Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog, is intended to help NASA prepare to return humans to the Moon and later send them to Mars. A first mission ran from 2023 to 2024 with four other volunteers. The next mission is planned for 2027. The program follows earlier analog experiments, including NASA's Hi Seas missions in a simulated environment on Hawaii, as well as the Mars 500 project that European, Russian and Chinese agencies carried out almost 15 years ago. Similar studies were run in the early 1990s at the Biosphere 2 complex in Arizona. In Germany, the European Space Agency and the German Aerospace Center in Cologne recently ended the Solis100 study, in which three men and three women aged 26 to 32 spent 100 days in isolation.