Current Event

Allegra Alfano

Chang, Kenneth. "In a Dome in Hawaii, a Mission to Mars." The New York Times. The New York Times, 20 Oct. 2014. Web. 02 Nov. 2014. <http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/21/science/taking-minds-on-a-journey-to-mars.html?ref=space&_r=0>.

The article I read was called “In a Dome in Hawaii, a Mission to Mars” by Kenneth Chang written for the New York Times. The article is about six people who are living in a dome on a Hawaiian volcano to mimic life on Mars. This study is being financed by NASA in order to test how well a small group of isolated people can work together. They are calling the project Hi-Seas. NASA is planning to send people to Mars in the 2030s and it would take approximately 6 months there 500 days on the planet and another 6 months back. All in all thats almost a year and a half of isolation. This project is supposed to find out the psychological risks of sending people to Mars so that NASA knows what to expect. The people at NASA are worried that astronauts they send to Mars might become depressed from the isolation and they want to know what type of personalities would fare the best in an isolated environment.

Other fake Mars missions have been happening in the past years. In Russia in 2010-2011 they had a simulation that lasted 520 which would be the duration of the actual mission. They had six volunteers and out of those six four of them developed sleep disorders and started to become less and less productive as the mission went on. Another group called the Mars Society, a non-profit that promotes human spaceflight, has had simulations in the desert of Utah that have been short since 2001 and they are going to have a one year experiment in the Canadian Arctic in 2015. There have already been two different four month experiments done by Hi-Seas and they are planning to have another one year mission next year with six people. The dome that they do the simulations in is two stories, 1,500 square feet, and at an altitude of 8,000 feet above sea level. The average US apartment size is about 1000 square feet, but usually there aren’t six people living in an apartment of that size. The people running the Hi-Seas missions have even delayed the time it takes to send an email by twenty minutes to simulate how long it would take to send messages from Mars to Earth. This makes real time conversation with the outside world impossible because it would take at least 40 minutes to get a reply. In reality the time lag would be less, but they are trying to prepare the ‘astronauts’ for the worst case scenario. There are somethings that the people in the dome are aloud to check. For example, they can check their bank account, and there is also a cellphone so that if there is weather that might threaten the dome they are made aware of it.

Over 150 people applied to be a part of the Hi-Seas crew but the three men and three women supposedly have a similar background as real astronauts and most aspire to go into space. All of the participants are in their mid twenties to mid thirties. One of the men participating in this mission has already done a two month one in Utah and another of the men was a grounds crew member on a previous mission. The point of the mission is to see how cohesive a group the six people can be after eight months together. NASA will have them go outside of the dome in spacesuits to collect data outside like astronauts would on Mars.

The impact that the Hi-Seas and similar project could have on society would be a better understanding of what happens psychologically to humans when they are isolated with a group of people for a long period of time. If nothing too bad happens to the people I don’t imagine it would have a huge impact on future space travel. On the other hand, if the people come out of the experiment and they are barely able to function people might question if it really is a good idea to send people to Mars or other far away places in space. Also if after a while on the mission the people start to deteriorate and are unable to collect data or carry out other portions of the mission it might not be worth it. The people conducting the experiments can also learn the qualities a person who would function best under the environment that space travel lends itself to in order to make the best out of a real mission to Mars.

This article did a good job describing what was going to happen while the people were going to be in the dome. The dome was described in full detail from its location, to what was inside the dome. Every aspect of what they were doing in the dome was in detail and what type of data they were collecting was also told. One thing that the author could have done better was describing what other studies like the Hi-Seas have found. For example, do the groups of people function well after isolation for a long period of time? That information would have been nice to know so we would know what results to expect from the Hi-Seas simulation.