The American space agency (NASA) has announced that it is looking for 4 motivated volunteers for a one-year simulation of life on Mars.
NASA simulation of life on Mars PHOTO Shutterstock
Starting from the spring of 2025, 4 volunteers will spend 12 months in the “Mars Dune Alpha” simulation, which will take place in Houston, Texas, Agerpres announces.
The site measures 160 square meters and is modeled after the concept of a research station on the planet Mars. The research station will be a 3D-printed modular construction located at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.
The program is designed to simulate the conditions and challenges of a manned mission to the Red Planet, including managing limited resources, equipment and system failures, communications delays, and other hostile environmental factors.
Robot operations
Among the tasks that will fall to the 4 volunteers are autonomous exits to the surface of the planet, operations with robots, maintaining the habitat and growing some crops.
This will be the second such simulation, which is part of NASA's “CHAPEA” (Crew Health And Performance Exploration Analog) program, designed to prepare future manned missions to this planet.
Interested individuals can apply by April 2, according to NASA. Volunteers must have a bachelor's degree in the natural sciences, be between the ages of 30 and 55, be “healthy and motivated,” be a non-smoker, and be a US citizen or US permanent resident. They must also or fluent English speakers.
The Ingenuity Martian helicopter, which went missing on mission on January 18, has been found. The last flyby image taken by the Perseverance rover
On February 4, NASA's Mars rover Perseverance captured an image of its now-defunct companion, the Ingenuity helicopter. The two probes spent nearly three Earth years probing the Red Planet for signs of ancient life and conducting aerial missions to Mars. The damaged Ingenuity helicopter was missing for just over two weeks.
The Perseverance rover captured the image at 1:05 p.m. GST, which shows the small helicopter standing alone on an arid Martian sand dune in the Neretva Vallis. The image was beamed back to Earth and processed by visual design student Simeon Schmauss, who assembled NASA's six raw images into a panorama, writes popsci.com.
On January 18, Ingenuity's rotors were damaged when it landed on what NASA called a “bland” patch of Martian landscape. The helicopter typically uses rocks and other distinctive features on the Red Planet to navigate, but the drone didn't have many visual cues during its 72nd and final flight.
