Happy Thought for 30 June 2023

Have a Happy Thought: 

 

At the end of this week, possibly as you are reading this email, you get to have some separation between work colleagues and home life. (If you’re retired… well, I’m already jealous, so don’t @ me with a “what is a week-end” sort of quote).

 

But four very lucky people (yes, I’m somehow jealous of them as well), this week began a 378-day “week”, being shut in with their colleagues.

 

June 25 2023 was the start of the CHAPEA Mission 1 - a simulated Mars habitat at NASA's Johnson Space Centre. For just over one year, these four people will live as if they were on Mars, giving us valuable insights into logistics and human psychology.

You can watch the emotional press-conference / shutting-the-door-behind-them, it’s actually very cute!

Mission patch for Chapea-1 https://www.nasa.gov/chapea/mission1 with the mission motto Ad Martus A Domo and the participants' names Selariu, Haston, Jones and Brockwell.

 

Of course, this is far from the first such experiment.

Antarctica of course remains a physically, logistically, and psychologically remote part of our own planet.

 

But space agencies around the world have been planning and training for long-distance planetary or space missions.

 

Russia conducted a series of successful missions between 2007 and 2011, with the longest mission lasting a whopping 520 days.

Official Logo of the Mars-500 mission, jointly run by Russia, the European Space Agency, and China.

 

Sleeping problems aside (apparently our circadian rhythms are thrown off fairly easily, as any uni or college student, or shift worker, could tell you), the mixed-nationality crew came out the other end in great health and spirits.

 

I’m skipping a few here, but we do need to get back to…

 

BioSphere 2. This facility was originally intended to be a closed system – meaning that like a habitat that could be built on the Moon or Mars, it could recycle all air, water, nutrients, etc needed to keep the plants and animals (including humans) inside it alive.

Geodesic glass-covered facility in a desert landscape. Image: Biosphere 2 in Arizona, By Johndedios - Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16883643

 

Biosphere 2… did not work as planned. We just hadn’t learned enough yet to create a fully functioning ecosphere. So things like plummeting oxygen levels and massive fluctuations in carbon dioxide in the air inside the dome meant it couldn’t act as an entirely closed system.

 

It’s very cool to think that thanks to experiments like Biosphere 2, which only really started in the late 1980’s, have led us to these more recent Mars-simulation missions like CHAPEA, and the possibility of actual missions to, or people living on, the Moon or Mars within the century!

 

And of course, very cool that experiments like Biosphere 2 get picked up in the general public imagination to become, well, whatever you call this:

Movie poster for Bio-Dome starring Pauly Shore and Stephen Baldwin. Close-up of those two men seemingly trying to get out of a glass-paned window.