How did you and five crewmates end up living on a volcano in Hawaii?
NASA wanted to know what happens, psychologically and socially, when you send six people off to live isolated on another planet – how we work together, how we respond to stress, how well we communicate with Earth. It was their longest-running Mars simulation, called the (HI-SEAS) mission. For 366 days up to August 2016, six of us lived in a geodesic metal dome.
Who was with you in the dome?
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Our group consisted of the commander, science officer, engineer, biologist, architect and me, the medical officer. We wore digital badges that monitored our interactions. For the most part we were lab rats, but we also did our own science, looking at the mountain’s geology, testing our hydroponic food-growing techniques and studying our own microbiomes.
How was the mission like living on Mars?
Our communications with the outside world were all delayed by 20 minutes, just as they could be between Mars and Earth, depending on their relative positions in space. We couldn’t use phones or Skype. Every time we went outside the habitat, we wore spacesuits. We didn’t see another soul for a year.
Did people fall out with each other?
We had some personality differences, but when times were tough we stayed together because we were all professionals. Working on our assigned duties and focusing on the mission kept the group unified. That was a big lesson.
What challenges stick in your mind?
The hardest part was the second quarter, when we were low on power and food. Due to administrative problems, we didn’t get a promised resupply – we were down to two kinds of dried vegetables, spinach and kale, and nobody wanted to eat them. And it was extremely cold. Morale was low, but on a mission like this, there will always be a trough.
There was a permanent fallout of our second-quarter blues: we developed a culture of staying in our rooms alone whenever it was cold. That habit never changed.
Did things turn for the better?
We got a resupply at Christmastime that included a third battery, so even when the days were short the lab could run for a day and a half on one day’s charging with our array of solar panels. Everything was suddenly great – we turned the heater on and started cooking. On Hannuka I cooked and taught everyone how to play a traditional Jewish game.
“I took my tomato and smelled it like a maniac for 10 minutes”
How did you celebrate festivals on “Mars”?
That’s an interesting question – what meaning would Christmas have on Mars anyway? It’s not connected to Martian seasons or to anyone who ever lived or died on Mars. Instead of Christmas, we celebrated a sort of non-denominational holiday.
But our first Martian holiday was in honour of our first tomato harvest. Our astrobiologist spent months raising those tomatoes. They grew out of bottles, hydroponically, because we had very little soil, just like on Mars. We each got one. We set out plates, sprinkled over dried parsley, lit candles and showed up nicely dressed for our one tomato. We called this holiday the Jour de la Grand Tomate – Day of the Great Tomato. That was the first fresh tomato we’d had in at least four months.
I took my tomato and smelled it like a maniac for 10 minutes – it smelled like a whole hothouse of tomatoes. When I finally tasted it, it burned my lips. There wasn’t anything wrong with it, there was something wrong with my lips. We didn’t have any acidic food; we had been eating powdered tomatoes. I had to eat the tomato carefully.
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Did you miss family and friends?
Hugely. Getting email from them was essential to my well-being. I watched as crewmates who did not have that support suffered. Just having that email arrive is critical – it’s proof that you still exist and still matter.
Based on your experiences, what sort of outlook would the first Mars colonists develop?
If you took someone born and raised on Mars and dropped them in Times Square, they would freak out at the amount of electricity being used for no good reason. Probably all the electricity we produced in a day would be burned in seconds. Earthly trash cans are full of things we Martians would never throw away. We either reuse it or melt it down and 3D-print it into something else. We don’t value stuff on Mars except in terms of its utility. Money is useless, and the only thing that matters is how smart, sane and capable you are.
What was it like being the chief medical officer?
The job of a doctor gets redefined. You go back to being like the old town doctor who goes around talking to people about their health, trying to keep them from getting sick. Once they get sick, what you can do is limited.
A space doctor begins each day with a prayer that they won’t have to do their job that day. We were lucky – only one person got seriously hurt during the mission, and it was me. I was exploring the local terrain when a lava tube collapsed on me and I hurt my knee.
You also experimented with virtual reality. What was that all about?
NASA want to know if VR can help with some of the loneliness or boredom when you’re living in a distant dome. They created an immersive experience on Earth using a 360-degree camera and recorded audio, and then we could step into it using equipment in the dome. The VR took me to Boston. I put the goggles on, and I was suddenly standing back on a familiar street. People were looking at me – they had been recorded approaching the VR camera, gesturing at it. It was like I had been physically beamed back to Earth. That would be a great way to use VR on Mars.
The day I participated in that experiment, my grandmother passed away – expectedly. The communication delay couldn’t be turned off because it wasn’t a crisis situation under the rules of our mission. So I had to say goodbye to her over delayed video, which is something you never want to do.
Some might argue it’s better to send people with less to lose into space. Would you agree?
The question is more basic: do you send social or asocial people? I say send people with the largest number of earthly attachments, for several reasons. One, if crew relationships go to hell, they’ll turn back to their support network. Two, they will fight like crazy to get back; they will hold the ship together. Three, which might be the most important reason: people on Earth want to come too, but they can’t. So you want super-social citizens of the world who constantly send messages back. We should send people who have lived in multiple countries, have practised multiple religions and are as flexible as possible. You’re not up there for you, after all. You’re up there for Earth.
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served as chief medical officer on NASA’s Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation mission. She is now scientist-in-residence at the Saint Louis Science Center, Missouri
This article appeared in print under the headline “Reflections of my year on Mars”
