Search Results for: mars

A Year and a Day in a Mars Simulator: Reflections at the Halfway Mark

Longreads Pick

At Aeon, Sheyna Gifford, mission physician for NASA’s HI-SEAS IV space exploration analogue, reflects on six months in a Mars simulator. When the six-person crew emerges on August 28th, 2016 — after a year and a day “off-planet” — they’ll have completed the longest NASA-funded Mars simulation in history.

Published: Feb 24, 2016
Length: 13 minutes (3,400 words)

A Year and a Day in a Mars Simulator: Reflections at the Halfway Mark

Mars' Silver Island. Photo courtesy of the European Space Agency. CCBY

At Aeon, Sheyna Gifford, mission physician for NASA’s HI-SEAS IV space exploration analogue, reflects on six months in a Mars simulator. When the six-person crew emerges on August 28th, 2016 — after a year and a day “off-planet” — they’ll have completed the longest NASA-funded Mars simulation in history.

Life on sMars, like on Mars itself, is elemental. Our chief concerns revolve around sun, air, water and rock — specifically, what we can and can’t do with those four basics in the right combinations. The Sun creates our energy. We, in turn, transform that energy into artificial light, in colours of the spectrum that most please our plants. The plants take up water, and set their roots in rocks that we’ve gathered from the surface. Their stems reach up towards the light, and our hopes grow with them: exhaled by the green leaves, born in the flowers that will bloom into fruit.

We brought along seeds, soil, and a special kind of bacteria. Cyanobacteria, as the name suggests, are green. In the bottle, they look thin and luminescent, like jello before it congeals. These versatile little creatures can convert carbon dioxide into breathable air. They can purify water. They can feed off the sparse Martian menu, using nitrogen from the air and minerals from the ground, or they can consume urine and break down our waste. Purely by living, breathing, eating and excreting, these little bacteria turn soil that’s been dried and fried under the pink Martian sky into a useful growing medium, and in the process make everything from biofuel to proteins — proteins by the ton, potentially — for future Martian colonists.

Collaboration is one of the key motivations behind the sMars project: to find out what people need to live, work and survive together on other planets, and how to give it to them. The idea sounds simple in principle, but is difficult in practice. To work together effectively, people need more than just food, water and energy. Shared mission goals help, but they still aren’t enough to keep people happy for months on end. So what is enough? The belief — the hope — is that there’s a recipe for making it work: that the right people, given the right tools, can live together in a small space under stressful circumstances for years and continue to perform at near-peak levels, the way that astronauts do when in low-Earth orbit aboard the International Space Station. Our jobs as simulated astronauts is to test out potential ingredients for that recipe.

In the future we’re trying to build, we will have to learn how not to fear the various deprivations. We’ll have to learn to embrace them instead, beginning with our own, very real, human limitations.

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More stories about Mars from the Longreads Archive

The First Person on Mars

Longreads Pick

“Evghenia Is on Mars” is a plot-rich fantasy Twitter account purportedly run by a female scientist delivering dispatches from Mars in 140-character bursts. In an unlikely but thoroughly wonderful essay, Smarsh uses Evghenia’s story as a jumping-off point to interrogate her own life, and the strange parallels in both their journeys.

Source: Vela Mag
Published: Oct 20, 2015
Length: 20 minutes (5,208 words)

Cass Sunstein Remembers Thurgood Marshall

You clerked with Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. What was he like?

He was very, very quick. He had a sense of the human reality of the cases, which he could size up in an instant partly because because he had been a trial lawyer. He was a repository of experience such as the human race rarely has. In the sense that he had been a lower court judge, a Supreme Court justice, solicitor general of the United States and the most successful supreme court advocate probably in the court’s history—at the point when the court was arguably more significant than at any time in the nation’s history.

So he argued and kind of conceptualized Brown v. Board of Education and he had at the top of his mind, it seemed, stories and anecdotes about the early civil rights days. He knew Martin Luther King, he had been on the phone with Roosevelt. He knew Johnson very, very well. He knew the Kennedys. So he was like a walking history book. But also someone who could read a brief and say, “I know what’s really going on here.” And there were some cases where the briefs wouldn’t capture what he knew was going on. And he would ask us, why don’t you do a little digging. And he was always right.

Legal scholar Cass Sunstein, interviewed by Matt Phillips in Quartz.

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Moving to Mars

Longreads Pick

How NASA is preparing its astronauts for for the longest, loneliest voyage ever.

Author: Tom Kizzia
Source: The New Yorker
Published: Apr 20, 2015
Length: 28 minutes (7,000 words)

All Dressed Up for Mars and Nowhere to Go

Longreads Pick

The troubling truth about Mars One, a company that is planning to send humans on a one-way trip to Mars.

Author: Elmo Keep
Source: Matter
Published: Nov 9, 2014
Length: 39 minutes (9,916 words)

Interview: ‘Poor Teeth’ Writer Sarah Smarsh on Class and Journalism

Longreads Pick

“Poverty isn’t a beat. Money is foundational to just about every human experience in our lopsided global economy. If you don’t realize that, you’ve probably never gone without it.”

Author: Julia Wick
Source: Longreads
Published: Nov 7, 2014
Length: 10 minutes (2,674 words)