In Pics: NASA Unveils Mars Habitat On Earth For Year-Long Experiments

Every space enthusiast wonders, as soon as Mars is considered for exploration, what a Martian house may be like. The independent space agency of the United States, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), has unveiled a 3D-printed housing for a future Mars expedition in an effort to partially allay that curiosity.

In the house NASA created to mimic the Martian climate, volunteers rather than astronauts will reside and experience it. This is a 3D-printed Mars simulation habitat in which, in the coming months, the volunteer crew, who are not astronauts, will enter to live and experience. The house has four small rooms, a gym, and a lot of red sand.

Photo Credit: AFP

The facility, created for three planned experiments called the Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analogue (CHAPEA), is located at the US space agency's massive research base in Houston, Texas.

Four volunteers will begin the first trial this summer, during which NASA plans to monitor their physical and mental health to better understand humans' fortitude for such a long isolation.

With that data, NASA will better understand astronauts' "resource use" on Mars, said Grace Douglas, lead researcher on the CHAPEA experiments.

"We can really start to understand how we're supporting them with what we're providing them, and that's going to be really important information for making those critical resource decisions," she said on a press tour of the habitat.

Such a distant mission comes with "very strict mass limitations," she added.

The volunteers will live inside a 1,700-square-foot (160-square-metre) home, dubbed "Mars Dune Alpha," which includes two bathrooms, a vertical farm to grow salad, a room dedicated to medical care, an area for relaxing, and several workstations.

An airlock leads to an "outdoor" reconstruction of the Martian environment, though still located inside the hangar.

Several pieces of equipment astronauts would likely use are scattered around the red sand-covered floor, including a weather station, a brick-making machine, and a small greenhouse.

There is also a treadmill on which the make-believe astronauts will walk suspended from straps to simulate the red planet's lesser gravity.

"We really can't have them just walking around in circles for six hours," joked Suzanne Bell, head of NASA's Behavioural Health and Performance Laboratory.

Four volunteers will use the treadmill to simulate long trips outside to collect samples, gather data, or build infrastructure, she said.

The members of the first experiment team have yet to be named, but the agency stated that selection "will follow standard NASA criteria for astronaut candidate applicants," with a heavy emphasis on backgrounds in science, technology, engineering, and math.

Researchers will regularly test the crew's response to stressful situations, such as restricted water availability or equipment failures.

The habitat has another special feature: it was 3D-printed.

"That is one of the technologies that NASA is looking at as a potential to build habitat on other planetary or lunar surfaces," Douglas said.

NASA is in the early stages of preparation for a mission to Mars, though most of the agency's focus is on the upcoming Artemis missions, which aim to return humans to the Moon for the first time in half a century.

(With inputs from AFP)