6 Scientists To Spend 8 Months In Tiny Dome As NASA Simulates Mission To Mars
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NASA's aim to achieve a foothold on Martian soil has taken another step higher. Six NASA-funded scientists have volunteered to take the challenge in entering a tiny dome and spend eight long months without any contact from the outside world.
Daily Mail said the project will be on the Big Island's Mauna Loa Volcano. It aims to study and look at human behavior in long-term space exploration including the planned journey to Mars in the future.
With no physical connections from people in the outside world, the group will work in with a 20-minute delay in communications mimicking the time for an email to arrive in Earth from Mars. The environment will be useful in the study since it will assess the physical and psychological difficulties associated with living in isolation and confinement for extended period.
Principal Investigator Kim Binstead, a University of Hawaii science professor, said, "We are hoping to figure out how best to select the individual astronauts, how to compose a crew and how to support that crew for a long duration of space missions."
Leading the world on a journey to Mars, NASA is burning their eyebrows to develop and find ways to let humans reach the Martian ground. According to them, the agency's detailed outline of the plan was released in its report to the public, "NASA's journey to Mars: Pioneering Next Steps in Space Exploration."
NASA administrator Charles Bolden explains, "NASA is closer to sending American astronaut to Mars than at any point in our history." He also added that "Today, we are publishing additional details about our journey to Mars plan and how we are aligning all of our work in support of this goal. In the coming weeks, I look forward to continuing to discuss the details of our plan with members of the congress, as well as our commercial and our international partners...."
Along with other strategies and developments in the plans aiming to reach Mars, this new project is designed to help the US space agency send humans to on long space voyages including to Mars by 2030s.
