Nasa is asking wannabe Martians to spend a year on the moon and Mars – all without actually leaving Earth.
The American space agency recently announced it’s accepting applications for its next simulated deep space mission.
The mission, called the Moon and Mars Exploration Analog (MMEA), recreates the cramped and lonely world of long-duration space exploration.
Four volunteers will live and work inside two ‘interplanetary environments’ at the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.
One environment is the HERA (Human Exploration Research Analog) habitat, which is a mock spaceship, and the phoney research base, CHAPEA (Crew Health And Performance Exploration Analog).
The journey to Mars will include virtual reality spacewalk simulations, while pretending to live on our celestial neighbour will see recruits doing Martian walks and operating a rover to travel to exploration sites.
The crew will carry out scheduled maintenance tasks, complete scientific experiments and respond to mock emergencies.
And, of course, a mandatory social media detox, with the volunteers cut off almost entirely from the outside world with limited resources.
The crew will spend around 366 days in isolation, according to the application form, which asks: ‘Are you willing to be confined and isolated for the required periods of time?’
Other questions include whether the applicant is claustrophobic.
With the two weeks of pre-mission screening, six weeks of training and two weeks of debriefing, all in all, the mission will last about 15 months.
Nasa doesn’t say volunteers will have a salary, per se, but they won’t go a year without being paid.
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‘Research volunteers will be reimbursed,’ the agency said, though ‘some restrictions apply to Nasa civil servants and contractors’.
While that figure probably isn’t in the millions, Nasa has paid people upwards of £13,000 to lie in bed to research microgravity, when the pull of gravity is so reduced that things appear to be weightless or in free fall.
To get a shot at escaping Earth for a year without leaving it, you need to be:
- A US citizen or green card holder between 30 and 55 years old.
- Proficient in English.
- No more than 6’2″ (188cm).
- Have no dietary restrictions nor a history of sleepwalking or taking sleeping aids.
- Have a bachelor’s degree from an accredited institution in engineering, biological science, physical science or mathematics.
The mission is expected to begin no earlier than August 2027.
This isn’t the first time people have been asked to live on the red planet.
The Mars Society, a nonprofit group that promotes human spaceflight, has run simulations in the Utah desert since 2001.
While a mission in Russia in 2010 and 2011 stretched 520 days, with four of the six fake astronauts developing sleeping disorders.
The Nasa-funded Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS), meanwhile, has seen teams spend months living inside domes.
The goal is to see just how well a group of people can get on living in cramped quarters or handle cabin fever -if they wanted to go outside, they had to wear a spacesuit.
The programme in 2015, for example, saw six people live inside a 1,000-square-foot domed structure for eight months.
Among them was Christiane Heinicke, a German physicist and engineer, who regularly posted about her life on Mars on X, then called Twitter.
Getting to the moon and Mars isn’t just about building a rocket – you need to make sure people can survive the trip.
Insights from the upcoming lunar and Martian simulation will be used to help ‘keep astronauts safe and mission-ready’.
Experts previously told Metro that Nasa’s goal of getting humans back on the moon by 2028 is that it’ll act like a trial run of a Martian mission.
Our natural satellite is only days away, whereas a trip to Mars would take months and can only be done at certain times due to the planet’s orbit.
The findings will also help Nasa with its plan to build a sustained human presence on the moon, including a research outpost, by 2032.
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