Could you survive a year on Mars?

Four engineers now have a well-informed take on the answer. On 31 October, the four emerged from a 158-square-metre, 3D-printed habitat at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, after spending just more than a year inside it for a simulated mission on the red planet.

The exercise was the second in a series of extended NASA simulations that aim to test how long-duration space missions affect astronauts’ health and performance. For more than a year, the crew grew their own crops, conducted science experiments and performed ‘Marswalks’ on a model of the planet’s surface outside their habitat.

Can you terraform Mars?

The mission also replicated the communication delays that astronauts on Mars would experience when contacting Earth: messages from the crew to mission control and vice versa took 13–22 minutes to arrive, varying with the distance between Earth and Mars. The crew even dealt with a planned two-week communication blackout, with no access to mission control or the outside world, that Martian astronauts would face when the Sun blocks transmission of radio signals between Mars and Earth.

The lessons learnt from these simulations will help NASA to understand how isolation and limited resources affect astronauts’ well-being and productivity, the agency says. NASA will use the results to inform protocols for crewed missions to Mars, which it has said could happen as soon as the early 2030s, as well as future trips to the Moon.

Nature spoke with Matthew Montgomery, a hardware engineering design consultant and co-owner of a film production company, who served as the mission’s science officer, to learn about his year on ‘Mars’.

What were your responsibilities as the mission's science officer?

Prior to the mission, I had worked in controlled-environment agriculture and studied factors such as the best LED lighting for crop growth, so I led the growing of our crops in the simulation. I’ve grown leafy greens, peppers and tomatoes outside of the mission in large growth facilities, and we were growing some of those same crops in the mission. It was also fun to grow those plants — just interacting with Earth-based things like plant life has a cognitive benefit as well as a nutrient benefit.

Geology was another huge portion of the mission. Rock collection is going to be incredibly important in a real mission to Mars, so we tried to mirror some of those aspects in the simulation. We analysed rock samples, performed mineral identification and simulated core analysis that Martian astronauts would do to study the geologic history of Mars.

How did the crew get along in such close quarters?

The crew spent a lot of time together prior to the mission, so we got to work on our teamwork and build relationships. We went on a winter camping expedition in Wyoming, where we encountered a blizzard! These high-pressure scenarios set a nice foundation for pre-training, where we spent five weeks together before going into isolation. Through all of those tools that we built, we had a really good dynamic as a team inside of the habitat, and conflict was very minimal.

What was the two-week communication blackout like?

We spent about a month preparing for the blackout. We were communicating with the ground teams to make sure we had all the procedures, schedules and goals for the two weeks. We put safety plans in place to make sure we had reviewed the right protocols if something went wrong.