The Asteroid Mission That Never Leaves Earth
For most people, the thought of spending every waking hour with strangers in a metal capsule roughly the size of a studio apartment for weeks sounds like the stuff of nightmares.
For others, it’s a dream.
About 400 people applied this year to live, work, and sleep in NASA’s Human Exploration Research Analog, a three-story habitat built to mimic the confinement of space missions and study human behavior and teamwork dynamics. The space agency has spent the last several months shuffling groups of four volunteers in and out of the habitat, which sits inside a warehouse at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. The groups live in the habitat for 45-day stays designed to simulate a round-trip journey to an asteroid to collect and return soil samples. The latest group emerged this month, were greeted with sparkling fruit juice, and returned to their daily lives, with some much-needed privacy.
The participants are essentially lab rats, the test subjects that will inform the procedures and protocols necessary that put six people in in Hawaii for eight months this year.
