Ex-UNSW academic Martha Lenio in NASA Mars simulation dome eight months

A FORMER UNSW academic is living in a dome for eight months in NASA’s longest simulation of life on a space station on Mars.

A FORMER UNSW academic is living in a dome for eight months in NASA’s longest simulation of life on a space station on Mars.

Martha Lenio, 34, will command three men and two women in the second of three missions sponsored by NASA and led by the University of Hawaii at Manoa studying human performance on long-duration isolation missions.

When she entered the Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS) dome on Mauna Loa on Wednesday, Lenio became only the third female commander of any NASA mission.

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The crew ... (from left) Brian Shiro, HI-SEAS Mission Support, University of Hawaii at Manoa; crew members Sophie Milam, Joceyln Dunn, Zak Wilson, Allen Mirkadyrov, Martha Lenio (HI-SEAS Commander) and Neil Scheibelhut. Picture: University of Hawaii at Manoa

For the next eight months Lenio and her crew will live in the two storey drome, which is 11 metres across.

“The grand level has a kitchen, dining area, working area, washroom and storage lab space. Upstairs, we each have our own bedrooms, which are tiny, glorified closets. There is a washroom upstairs, too. There’s only one real window in the dome. We have a treadmill and stationary bike. The space is very similar to the amount of space you would have at a station on Mars,” Lenio told National Geographic.

“Everyone is allotted eight litres of water a day. That eight litres per day is everything you can drink, everything for cooking, cleaning, doing laundry, and showering. That works out to be eight minutes of shower time a week. We have composting toilets, which reduces our water use.

“We have to bring food that is shelf stable for two to three years, as it would be on a Mars mission. We have freeze-dried fruits and vegetables and some meat. There’s also a food study being performed by Cornell. One of the things that happens on a long-duration space mission is that you get food fatigue and everything starts to taste the same, so they’re trying to figure out what foods we won’t get sick of. So we have a really extensive spice kit. We can make our own yogurt. We can make bread. We have every type of grain and flour you can imagine. There are also some premade meals.”

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Lenio and her crew cannot phone the outside world, or use Skype, though they are allowed to use email. There is a 20-minute delay in sending and receiving messages — the delay that occurs to/from Earth and Mars.

Home for eight months ... The Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS) dome on Mauna Loa, Hawaii. Picture: Sian Proctor and University of Hawaii at Manoa

Kim Binsted, who runs the project for the University of Hawaii Manoa and NASA, said the focus is on team cohesion.

“Long story short, we want to know how you pick a team, and then support a team, for these long-duration space missions so they won’t kill each other,” Binsted told The Globe and Mail.

“These are long-duration isolation missions … in a really harsh environment. This isn’t the swaying palm trees and beaches most people think of when they think of Hawaii. It’s very Mars-like.”

Mauna Loa is the second-largest volcano in the solar system, behind Olympus Mons on Mars. They look eerily similar. It is a barren landscape which the crew will be able to see only through the small window panel in the white dome, or when they suit up and go outside — a process that takes hours.

But it is the mundanity of daily life that concerns NASA most.

“That can be wearing and a little trippy, in a way,” Binsted said. “Your world compresses to this one space.”

Lenio told National Geographic that the capabilities to go to Mars are here.

“The (predicted date) for a Mars mission is 2030, so we’re already in the very early stages of a Mars mission. People are working on it right now,” she said.

“In short, we have the technology to stay on Mars for a fixed, planned length of time, but we are not ready to stay indefinitely.”

The simulation mission is the longest attempted at the HI-SEAS facility, although a further simulation for one year is planned in 2015.

The Institute for Biomedical Problems and the European Space Agency’s Mars500 mission is the longest Mars simulation — 520 days (more than 17 months).

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