NASA’s CHAPEA mission that sent 4 people to artificial Mars

Started on June 25, 2023, NASA’s monumental Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog or CHAPEA mission concluded on 6th July 2024. The mission sent four people in a Mars simulation for a period of more than a year. The group of four people consisted of a medical officer, mission specialist and two more trained professionals.
The CHAPEA mission
CHAPEA mission aims to assess and collect data regarding NASA’s food system and physical and behavioral health patterns in humans which will help during future space missions.It is a series of analog missions that will imitate year-long stays on the surface of mars. It is expected that for each mission, a team of four crew members will live on Mars Dune Alpha, an artificial mimicked Mars habitat. After the successful completion of this mission recently, two more are scheduled for 2025 and 2026.
What is Mars Dune Alpha?
Mars Dune Alpha is a 3D printed structure that will simulate an environment like on the real Mars planet. This 1700 square foot habitat includes private crew quarters, kitchen, medical rooms, common lounge areas, fitness areas, technical work areas, two bathrooms and crop growing stations. These 3D settlements eliminate the need to relaunch multiple flights for future space exploration data. This structure is situated at Johnson Space Center in Houston.
This time for more than a year, the crew performed various tasks in the simulation which included ‘Marswalk’, growing and harvesting vegetables to provide food for themselves, maintaining their habitat and various other equipments, and worked under additional stressors which people when sent on Mars will face like communication breakdowns with earth, isolation, and limited resources for survival.
Four member groups for this project included- Kelly Haston, Anca Selariu, Ross Brockwell and Nathan Jones. These missions are there to help facilitate NASA’s ambitious mission to send humans to explore the surface of Mars. They aim to launch these missions by late 2030’s or early 2040’s.
Life on Mars?
Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun. It is assumed that this is the only other planet, after earth, where life may have existed. Its gravity is just 38% of earth. After primary inspection of Martian surface- scientists have found unquestionable works of ancient, flowing liquids. Earlier Earth like Mars, due to reasons unknown, went through transformation to become what it is today- a dusty, dry red planet. In 1971, the Soviet Union was the first nation to have a soft landing on Mars.