NASA is looking for people who want to spend a year simulating a mission on Mars | Hacker News Reader

NASA is looking for people who want to spend a year simulating a mission on Mars

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133 pointsRickJWagner88 comments

Better source: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/nasa-is-recruiting-for-yearlong...

To qualify, you must be:

* A U.S. citizen or permanent resident.

* A non-smoker, age 30 to 55 years old, and proficient in English.

* A viable candidate as an actual astronaut. For this, you usually need a master's degree in a STEM field, or you need to be a pilot or doctor or military officer.

> A U.S. citizen or permanent resident.

I guess I’ll have to wait for the ESA version…

You must also pass the medical screening, which prohibits a laundry list of common medications:

- blood pressure medications

- blood thinners

- seizure medications

- daily allergy medications

- diabetic insulin daily

- sleeping aids

- ADHD/ADD medications

- antidepressants

- anxiety medications

(Insert grumbling about "flight surgeon horseshit" here.)

Gattaca Here we come!

I don't think my seasonal allergies are going to be a problem in space.

You'll be growing crops year round, indoors. So you could be miserable. Curious if they select for plant strains that give off less pollen.

I have idiopathic allergies and mold and mildew drive me absolutely batty.

There's really no way to avoid bringing those with you, and if the humidity control isn't just right, well then that stuff can grow anywhere that humidity accumulates. And it's not like you can open the windows and scrub the place down every six months to keep it at bay.

When all crops will be (presumably) manually pollinated, it might be easier with plants that produce a lot of pollen.

Every time they run one of these similations they ignore the common realworld analogue: sailors. All around the world are tiny communities of mostly men living inside metal boxes for months or years at a time. Historic voyages regularly lasted even longer than the proposed mars missions, and where much more dangerous. Astronaughts could learn much from common sailors.

You can even take it a step further to the subset of sailors that operate on submarines.

Military is different. Those are much larger crews and dont spend as much time at sea, generally only a few months at a time.

Depends on your military, I guess. I know in the U.K. 9 months isn’t an unusual deployment for a submariner, and a few months underwater isn’t unusual either.

Isolation is pretty much their number one challenge. Machines are easier to keep running than minds.

It doesn't seem like they ignore it. Sailors might be a decent analogue for astronauts while isolated within a space vessel, but that's not what this experiment is. NASA wants to research the environment while on a Martian surface mission, including doing stuff like suiting up in spacesuits to go do work outside, deal with communication delays, and having research responsibilities.

It's somewhat similar to being confined on a sailing ship, but is still different, and the minute details really matter for something like this.

E.g.:

> The ship, without a mast or a rudder, was carried across the northern Pacific Ocean by currents. It drifted for 14 months, during which the crew lived on desalinated seawater and on the rice of their cargo.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otokichi

"The Makah took the three survivors of the broken ship and held them as slaves for several months before taking them to Fort Vancouver."

^ Their story only got worse! The tribe turned them into slaves.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Makah

I know there are different gradations of slavery, but I'd take working for food and shelter over fourteen months of rice and water. Especially seeing as eleven of fourteen men outright died on rice and water.

I think it's not about proving that the long isolation is possible, but rather about carrying this experiment in a controlled environment and doing a study.

These people usually make good money and often need to make good money, because they have families and mortgages.

It won't be easy to find people fulfilling all that criteria (including health requirements) and willing to leave a good job for a year.

They will be compensated. More importantly, it's the chance to do something weird, meaningful, and important. To be a part of history. Not to mention that getting away from one's life is a selling point to quite a number of people. I myself think they'll be swamped with applicants.

NASA missed an opportunity not conducting the study over the last 15 months. They could have recruited hundreds of millions of study participants with no additional costs or fundamental behavior alterations required.

I wouldn't be so sure that the next 12 months will be too much different.

One difference is that many potential participants in this experiment will have been living a somewhat restricted life for the past 15 months and will be less willing than usual to continue that experience

Assuming we don’t continue to have global pandemics in the near future

Delta variant says we will…

Variants combined with climate change could keep this going for a long time.

Not being able to go to your favorite cafe / restaurant as frequently != being confined in a windowless structure

Why does it need to be windowless? You could have windows looking out at arid landscapes of Mars. You'd see sunsets, sunrises, highnoon, etc. You could even see the local "weather".

This is what was described about this simulation

I get that, I'm just saying why does it need to not have windows?

I can only guess because I haven't read much into it. I think that they're trying to simulate the feeling of isolation one might experience on Mars. From an article it also seems like they will severely limit your contact with friends / family as well, presumably for the same purpose.

I could see them simulate a severely constrained internet access, with limited bandwidth and minutes-long ping.

Yeah, I think total cut off is weird. Maybe allow for it most of the time, but do "tests" where the signal is lost due to high winds damaging an antenna. Then the people have to don space suits to put it back together, etc. Otherwise, a compress collection of text only messages wouldn't be that big of a deal to send back and forth would it? Maybe a couple of images each day? Hell, we receive images from Mars daily now.

Sometimes, these "tests" are unnecessarily obtuse. I understand, test the most extreme, but sometimes that unlikely extreme is enough to cause people to not care.

so... perfect for HN? sign me up!

Mars doesn't have an ionosphere. Windows run in direct opposition to radiation shielding.

That's why we're going to need to build a portable mini magnetic shield. It might not be planet sized, but imagine having the auroras just out of reach. Plus, being able to say "Raise the shields" and it not be just a line in a movie would be cool on its own accord.

windows are weak points.

It's possible, but that's also something that needs constant power and effort. Living in a cave or piling up rocks might be much more resilient

It would also be useful on the ride to the new planet while in the metal tube for months on end.

I don't know, but this reminds me of a saying they had in the army, something along the lines of "training must be so hard as to make the real thing feel like a break". Not having windows seems harder than the real thing. If you can go through that, you'll likely be ok during the real thing.

If the real thing goes wrong, it better not be worst than what you trained for.

On Mars you have to deal with radiation because there is no magnetic field. The most realistic way to do that in early missions is by putting rock between the habitation module and the sky, either by burying it in regolith or by putting it in natural lava tubes. Either option makes windows difficult.

If this experiment shows that windows are vital, I'm sure there are ways to make it work. But otherwise windows are an unnecessary complication that we can figure out once we have experience with the more essential problems of living on Mars.

I've often thought that wall-sized retina monitors would be wonderful. People can travel the world this way without ever leaving the room.

But it might work even with the large TV monitors today. Just put a camera where the nice view is, and pipe it in to the screen.

VR has probably killed that market.

Walter you might be interested to know that London City airport's Air traffic controllers do actually use this technology. There isn't enough space for a full tower so they have a redundant camera system on site and the controllers are nearby elsewhere - this allows them to use tricks like overlaying data about aircraft onto their view, and they actually compress the whole viewing area directly onto their panels.

https://youtu.be/MsoxL6tMG_I

Interesting link. One issue I have with this is the binocular replacement system of PTZ camera system can only look in one direction at a time vs multiple people scanning in multiple places at once.

Otherwise, I like the idea. Hopefully, nobody with a backhoe starts digging into their dedicated fiber lines.

But not smell it. Neither feel it. For instance the moments where temperature, moisture, dew point make it 'just right/silken air'.

You can't smell or feel a movie, either. But they still work.

Yes. But they are still not 'the real thing'.

If you're Jeff Bezos, you brag about how large your windows are. Windows are very necessary as a selling point for Blue Origin, but since their ship can barely get out of atmo, they're still benefiting Earth's shield. We'll see how Bezos feels about those windows when/if he gets a judge to tell NASA to fund BO to build a moon mission (bwahaahahaa)

In Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars the first settlements on Mars are underground and windowless to protect from radiation iirc.

>Why does it need to be windowless?

Radiation? or to train for space travel where you have no landscape or sunrises

But no atmosphere either, thus galaxies and nebula visible to the bare eye, apart from countless stars.

That's not exactly how that works. The light from galaxies and other Deep Sky Objects (DSOs) are too faint for the human eye. Only with much more sensitive electronic chips or the longer accumulation of photons from long exposures do we get to see these DSOs. Also, a lot of these DSOs are hidden out of the visible light spectrum.

So if the earth was to suddenly lose its atmosphere today, we wouldn't be seeing DSOs tonight. However, the stars and stuff we can see would suddenly stop twinkling.

On a night with good conditions I can recognize for instance Andromeda Galaxy, Orion Nebula, and the hazy stuff around the Plejades with my bare eyes, though faint, and not colored like with astrophotography. Are you telling me I couldn't see them better without atmosphere? Do I have owl eyes, or what?

Okay, now you're going to make me qualify it based on the object's magnitude. Let's try this. If the earth lost its atmosphere today, you would not suddenly see things tonight that you wouldn't normally have seen before.*

*If you live some place with so much humidity/heat that the air was always working against to you seeing things clearly that now are suddenly clear, maybe you'll see more. However, other places on the planet still saw them. Kind of like living in a large city with horrible light pollution. Just because you can't see them doesn't mean they're not visible elsewhere.

You know? A long time ago I bicycled far through the forest with a self-built trailer for transporting my 'lil' Newton' in the late evening, especially during winter. Breathing in trough the nose, and exhaling through a few meters of garden hose to avoid condensation. Somewhere near there:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TIRA

Though that was about 1980, not as light-polluted as it is now. I don't do things like that anymore, but I'm still thinking I'm not talking non-sense when it comes to that stuff (magnitudes, etc.)

Maybe I have owl eyes ;-)

There is even radiaton hardened glas, i just looked it up.

https://www.schott.com/advanced_optics/english/products/opti...

Would have a tint though.

Because there is no possibility of sending windows to Mars for a hypothetical first base there. It would be far too expensive, and given the already extreme difficulty of such a mission, it would be a huge luxury.

A lot of gamers would be perfectly happy with this setting.

Yeah they could have done it in Italy too

I wonder if this is a continuation of the same research the habitat podcast was based on:

https://gimletmedia.com/shows/the-habitat

The podcast was an interesting big brother style reality show depicting 6 people living inside a potential Mars habitat for a year as research for NASA. Descriptions sound very similar. May want to listen to the podcast before you volunteer :-)

I remember the Biosphere 2 project from the early 90s which was everywhere in the news but didn't work out.

"Biosphere 2 was only used twice for its original intended purposes as a closed-system experiment: once from 1991 to 1993, and the second time from March to September 1994. Both attempts, though heavily publicized, ran into problems including low amounts of food and oxygen, die-offs of many animals and plants included in the experiment (though this was anticipated since the project used a strategy of deliberately 'species-packing' anticipating losses as the biomes developed), group dynamic tensions among the resident crew, outside politics and a power struggle over management and direction of the project."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2

Have you watched spaceship earth, the biosphere 2 documentary? I remember learning about it in science class in middle school so it had an aire of legitimacy to it, but that story is nuts, including the fact that it was basically started by a cult with a billionaire best friend and Steve Bannon(yes, that one) being Director of the project for a while.

I actually think Biosphere 2 was quite successful. As an engineering project it failed, but in terms of research it provided a lot of useful data.

The core issue with the design was actually concrete absorbing Oxygen from the interior air. That’s exactly the kind of issue you want to consider if we ever want to actually make sustainable habitats. Unfortunately, they never tried to make a biosphere 3, but I suspect that would have been far less ambitious yet more successful.

I think it's criminal how little research is being done in this area. Sustainable, closed ecosystems are very likely to be key to humanity's future survival and are a prerequisite for leaving Earth on any kind of long term basis.

I visited there in 1999. After the original experiment failed, it ended up used by Columbia University for research and a friend of mine from high school was a student there. She and I drove all the way from LA to Oracle, AZ to pick up a friend of hers doing a summer course there, stayed a few days, and he came back to LA to spent the rest of the summer with us.

Years later, in the Army, I was struck by how similar the permanent living structures at the National Training Center are to those at Biosphere II. At least structurally. The students get real rooms whereas we got cots and tape on the floor. Another thing that struck me at NTC was how similar the landscape looked to any pictures I've ever seen of Mars. If NASA wants maximum fidelity, don't just put these people in a closed room, but do it underground in Death Valley.

Came here to mention this, it's a fun podcast to binge in a day/night.

I was going to mention this. Here's The Atlantic write-up on the project:

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/11/hi-seas-...

The podcast was pretty entertaining and enlightening, and not too long. 6 (untrained) people in close quarters and isolation for a long time seems a recipe for mayhem. I know astronauts do long stints but they're trained and supported by people who share their purpose.

They should recruit from submariners. I spent two months underwater and didn't mind it.

Some of the questions (re military, specops and confined spaces) seems to suggest they're willing to do just that.

>NASA is calling for applicants interested in spending a year in a 1,700 square foot habitat

For some people like me that is called an upgrade from last year.

On a side note, I wonder how interested we'll be in Mars once the novelty wears off.

Will it still be a place where we send our best and brightest? Or a place where we send those who have few other options?

My bet is on the latter.

If that didn’t happen to the Moon, why would it happen on even more difficult missions?

Right on, it's kind of surprising how quickly our interest in the Moon waned off after the first series of Apollo missions

I don't see anything about compensation. How much do they pay? Considering the requirements they should very pay well for something like this.

I'm guessing that compensation is no better than it would be for astronauts (GS-13 or so, around $100k)

I spent the last year during the pandemic living alone and growing potatoes. Where do I apply?

A pilot, a doctor, and a military officer are all living together in an RV for a year. Who does the cleaning?

Looks similar to the joint Russian/EU experiment MARS-500: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MARS-500

The new season of Big Brother sponsored by SpaceX.

UV b erry Dr' h fwdir. Ft optDr

Already did in last year.

"Biosphere 2 Part Deux, The Perchlorate Threat"

this reminds me Biosphere project

Perhaps ask Jeff Bezos? :)

Jeff is currently too occupied sueing NASA for not giving him money to use a space craft he hasn't built yet. Then again, maybe NASA should select him as he can't be doing too much suing if he's sequestered for a year.

Seeking to extend the isolation of COVID life? Well, you're in luck. Apply now!

Iv heard John C. Reilly is available https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zdha2OfhGzk

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