Photo Illustration by Erin O’Flynn/The Daily Beast/NASA
If we’re ever going to send people to visit Mars, we’re going to have to deal with one big problem: We just don’t know what will happen to the human body there. Humans have never set foot on another planet before, and when they do they’ll have to deal with weird circumstances like eating strange food, living in a tiny box, and regularly tromping through miles of dusty desert in a spacesuit. If these future explorers are going to have any chance at survival, we’ll need to know a lot more about what this will do to their bodies and their minds.
Space agencies like NASA aren’t big on unknown risks, so they’re already trying to predict what challenges a Mars mission might have on the human body. It’s not easy to guess that in advance—but one way they’re trying to learn about these consequences is through analog (or closely similar) missions.
The Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog (CHAPEA) mission will begin next month, with four crew members entering a 1,700 square foot enclosed bubble at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Specifically, they’ll live in a 3D-printed habitat with a 1,200 square foot Mars-like sandbox where they’ll perform simulated missions, all to see what it would be like for a real crew to live on the red planet.