You are probably familiar with the names Wiseman, Glover, Koch, and Hansen from the Artemis II mission, but how about the names Elder, Ellis, Montgomery, and Spicer. It is not a law firm, but rather the four crew members who just completed 378 days as part of NASA’s simulated Mars mission.
Their full names and titles are:
- Ross Elder, mission commander;
- Ellen Ellis, medical officer;
- Matthew Montgomery, science officer; and
- James Spicer, flight engineer.
The simulated Mars mission, called the Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog (CHAPEA), took place at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. The four-member crew lived in a 1,700 square foot habitat for more than a year conducting scientific research and operational tasks. It is the second such mission to test out the idea of humans living in isolation on the Moon and Mars.
Michael Stenger, chief scientist for NASA’s Human Research Program, had this to say about the role of the latest CHAPEA mission:
This mission has been incredibly valuable in starting to teach us how to understand requirements for year-long missions, including medical and psychological care, via communication delays…When combining this Mars-realistic mission analog with a suite of physiological, psychological, and performance measures in a rigorously controlled environment, we’ll be able to translate the knowledge from these experiences to Moon Base and beyond.
While you might expect Mr. Musk to be financing such work given all of his talk about going to Mars (rather than blowing hundreds of millions of dollars on political campaigns), the funding and hard work is being done by NASA alone.
Congrats to the four crew members for their hard work!
