NASA study in Hawaii paving way for human travel to Mars

HONOLULU — A group of NASA-funded researchers was poised to enter an isolated geodesic dome on a remote Hawaii volcano to study human behavior in long-term space exploration, including a planned voyage to Mars.

The team will have no physical contact with people in the outside world and will work with a 20-minute delay in communications, the time it would take for an email to reach Earth from Mars.

The project is designed to help the U.S. space agency send humans on long space voyages including to Mars by the 2030s.

“We’re hoping to figure out how best to select individual astronauts, how to compose a crew and how to support that crew on long-duration space missions,” principal investigator Kim Binstead, a University of Hawaii science professor.

The other team members include engineers, a computer scientist, a doctoral candidate and a biomedical expert.

The experiment quickly spiraled out of control as the habitat failed to maintain safe levels of carbon dioxide and the crew grew discontent.

There are a number of other Mars simulation projects around the world, but the Hawaii project has been receiving federal funding for several years and is unique, the university says, because of its accessibility, weather and Mars-like geography, tucked away on a rocky, red plain below the summit of the world’s largest active volcano.