[HN Gopher] NASA is looking for people who want to spend a year ...
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NASA is looking for people who want to spend a year simulating a
mission on Mars
Author : RickJWagner
Score : 120 points
Date : 2021-08-07 14:03 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theblaze.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theblaze.com)
| qz_ wrote:
| We're posting links from The Blaze now? Really?
| svnpenn wrote:
| First thing I thought. All you have to do is look at the
| garbage on the homepage:
|
| https://www.theblaze.com
| anoonmoose wrote:
| While I don't want to see HN devolving into political arguments
| about what sources are and aren't good, I do feel like it's
| worth noting that
|
| 1- this site is full of ads, with terrible information density
|
| 2- it's just summarizing an official press release [1], on a
| site that does not have ads (the site itself is sort of an ad I
| suppose)
|
| I can't see any reason why you would want to post this Blaze
| link instead of the NASA link, especially given the high
| flamewar potential
|
| [1] https://www.nasa.gov/feature/nasa-is-recruiting-for-
| yearlong...
| tosstoyevsky wrote:
| Reee!
| rasz wrote:
| Iv heard John C. Reilly is available
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zdha2OfhGzk
| shahbaby wrote:
| On a side note, I wonder how interested we'll be in Mars once the
| novelty wears off.
|
| Will it still be a place where we send our best and brightest? Or
| a place where we send those who have few other options?
|
| My bet is on the latter.
| wait_a_minute wrote:
| If that didn't happen to the Moon, why would it happen on even
| more difficult missions?
| ffitch wrote:
| Right on, it's kind of surprising how quickly our interest in
| the Moon waned off after the first series of Apollo missions
| napier wrote:
| NASA missed an opportunity not conducting the study over the last
| 15 months. They could have recruited hundreds of millions of
| study participants with no additional costs or fundamental
| behavior alterations required.
| paulpauper wrote:
| Yeah they could have done it in Italy too
| yreg wrote:
| I wouldn't be so sure that the next 12 months will be too much
| different.
| FatalLogic wrote:
| One difference is that many potential participants in this
| experiment will have been living a somewhat restricted life
| for the past 15 months and will be less willing than usual to
| continue that experience
| gugtude wrote:
| Assuming we don't continue to have global pandemics in the
| near future
| rbanffy wrote:
| Delta variant says we will...
| hncurious wrote:
| Variants combined with climate change could keep this
| going for a long time.
| rbanffy wrote:
| A lot of gamers would be perfectly happy with this setting.
| hereforphone wrote:
| Not being able to go to your favorite cafe / restaurant as
| frequently != being confined in a windowless structure
| dylan604 wrote:
| Why does it need to be windowless? You could have windows
| looking out at arid landscapes of Mars. You'd see sunsets,
| sunrises, highnoon, etc. You could even see the local
| "weather".
| quakeguy wrote:
| There is even radiaton hardened glas, i just looked it up.
|
| https://www.schott.com/advanced_optics/english/products/opt
| i...
|
| Would have a tint though.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Because there is no possibility of sending windows to Mars
| for a hypothetical first base there. It would be far too
| expensive, and given the already extreme difficulty of such
| a mission, it would be a huge luxury.
| simion314 wrote:
| >Why does it need to be windowless?
|
| Radiation? or to train for space travel where you have no
| landscape or sunrises
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| But no atmosphere either, thus galaxies and nebula
| visible to the bare eye, apart from countless stars.
| dylan604 wrote:
| That's not exactly how that works. The light from
| galaxies and other Deep Sky Objects (DSOs) are too faint
| for the human eye. Only with much more sensitive
| electronic chips or the longer accumulation of photons
| from long exposures do we get to see these DSOs. Also, a
| lot of these DSOs are hidden out of the visible light
| spectrum.
|
| So if the earth was to suddenly lose its atmosphere
| today, we wouldn't be seeing DSOs tonight. However, the
| stars and stuff we can see would suddenly stop twinkling.
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| On a night with good conditions I can recognize for
| instance Andromeda Galaxy, Orion Nebula, and the hazy
| stuff around the Plejades with my bare eyes, though
| faint, and not colored like with astrophotography. Are
| you telling me I couldn't see them better without
| atmosphere? Do I have owl eyes, or what?
| dylan604 wrote:
| Okay, now you're going to make me qualify it based on the
| object's magnitude. Let's try this. If the earth lost its
| atmosphere today, you would not suddenly see things
| tonight that you wouldn't normally have seen before.*
|
| *If you live some place with so much humidity/heat that
| the air was always working against to you seeing things
| clearly that now are suddenly clear, maybe you'll see
| more. However, other places on the planet still saw them.
| Kind of like living in a large city with horrible light
| pollution. Just because you can't see them doesn't mean
| they're not visible elsewhere.
| hereforphone wrote:
| This is what was described about this simulation
| dylan604 wrote:
| I get that, I'm just saying why does it need to not have
| windows?
| yarky wrote:
| I don't know, but this reminds me of a saying they had in
| the army, something along the lines of "training must be
| so hard as to make the real thing feel like a break". Not
| having windows seems harder than the real thing. If you
| can go through that, you'll likely be ok during the real
| thing.
|
| If the real thing goes wrong, it better not be worst than
| what you trained for.
| wongarsu wrote:
| On Mars you have to deal with radiation because there is
| no magnetic field. The most realistic way to do that in
| early missions is by putting rock between the habitation
| module and the sky, either by burying it in regolith or
| by putting it in natural lava tubes. Either option makes
| windows difficult.
|
| If this experiment shows that windows are vital, I'm sure
| there are ways to make it work. But otherwise windows are
| an unnecessary complication that we can figure out once
| we have experience with the more essential problems of
| living on Mars.
| dylan604 wrote:
| If you're Jeff Bezos, you brag about how large you
| windows are. Windows are very necessary as a selling
| point for Blue Origin, but since their ship can barely
| get out of atmo, they're still benefiting Earth's shield.
| We'll see how Bezos feels about thos windows when/if he
| gets a judge to tell NASA to fund BO to build a moon
| mission (bwahaahahaa)
| WalterBright wrote:
| I've often thought that wall-sized retina monitors would
| be wonderful. People can travel the world this way
| without ever leaving the room.
|
| But it might work even with the large TV monitors today.
| Just put a camera where the nice view is, and pipe it in
| to the screen.
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| But not smell it. Neither feel it. For instance the
| moments where temperature, moisture, dew point make it
| 'just right/silken air'.
| mhh__ wrote:
| VR has probably killed that market.
|
| Walter you might be interested to know that London City
| airport's Air traffic controllers do actually use this
| technology. There isn't enough space for a full tower so
| they have a redundant camera system on site and the
| controllers are nearby elsewhere - this allows them to
| use tricks like overlaying data about aircraft onto their
| view, and they actually compress the whole viewing area
| directly onto their panels.
|
| https://youtu.be/MsoxL6tMG_I
| dylan604 wrote:
| Interesting link. One issue I have with this is the
| binocular replacement system of PTZ camera system can
| only look in one direction at a time vs multiple people
| scanning in multiple places at once.
|
| Otherwise, I like the idea. Hopefully, nobody with a
| backhoe starts digging into their dedicated fiber lines.
| hereforphone wrote:
| I can only guess because I haven't read much into it. I
| think that they're trying to simulate the feeling of
| isolation one might experience on Mars. From an article
| it also seems like they will severely limit your contact
| with friends / family as well, presumably for the same
| purpose.
| Valgrim wrote:
| I could see them simulate a severely constrained internet
| access, with limited bandwidth and minutes-long ping.
| gruez wrote:
| so... perfect for HN? sign me up!
| dylan604 wrote:
| Yeah, I think total cut off is weird. Maybe allow for it
| most of the time, but do "tests" where the signal is lost
| due to high winds damaging an antenna. Then the people
| have to don space suits to put it back together, etc.
| Otherwise, a compress collection of text only messages
| wouldn't be that big of a deal to send back and forth
| would it? Maybe a couple of images each day? Hell, we
| receive images from Mars daily now.
|
| Sometimes, these "tests" are unnecessarily obtuse. I
| understand, test the most extreme, but sometimes that
| unlikely extreme is enough to cause people to not care.
| X6S1x6Okd1st wrote:
| Mars doesn't have an ionosphere. Windows run in direct
| opposition to radiation shielding.
| dylan604 wrote:
| That's why we're going to need to build a portable mini
| magnetic shield. It might not be planet sized, but
| imagine having the auroras just out of reach. Plus, being
| able to say "Raise the shields" and it not be just a line
| in a movie would be cool on its own accord.
| platz wrote:
| windows are weak points.
| comrh wrote:
| In Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars the first settlements on
| Mars are underground and windowless to protect from
| radiation iirc.
| mikkergp wrote:
| I wonder if this is a continuation of the same research the
| habitat podcast was based on:
|
| https://gimletmedia.com/shows/the-habitat
|
| The podcast was an interesting big brother style reality show
| depicting 6 people living inside a potential Mars habitat for a
| year as research for NASA. Descriptions sound very similar. May
| want to listen to the podcast before you volunteer :-)
| wayne wrote:
| I remember the Biosphere 2 project from the early 90s which was
| everywhere in the news but didn't work out.
|
| "Biosphere 2 was only used twice for its original intended
| purposes as a closed-system experiment: once from 1991 to 1993,
| and the second time from March to September 1994. Both
| attempts, though heavily publicized, ran into problems
| including low amounts of food and oxygen, die-offs of many
| animals and plants included in the experiment (though this was
| anticipated since the project used a strategy of deliberately
| 'species-packing' anticipating losses as the biomes developed),
| group dynamic tensions among the resident crew, outside
| politics and a power struggle over management and direction of
| the project."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2
| mikkergp wrote:
| Have you watched spaceship earth, the biosphere 2
| documentary? I remember learning about it in science class in
| middle school so it had an aire of legitimacy to it, but that
| story is nuts, including the fact that it was basically
| started by a cult with a billionaire best friend and Steve
| Bannon(yes, that one) being Director of the project for a
| while.
| Retric wrote:
| I actually think Biosphere 2 was quite successful. As an
| engineering project it failed, but in terms of research it
| provided a lot of useful data.
|
| The core issue with the design was actually concrete
| absorbing Oxygen from the interior air. That's exactly the
| kind of issue you want to consider if we ever want to
| actually make sustainable habitats. Unfortunately, they never
| tried to make a biosphere 3, but I suspect that would have
| been far less ambitious yet more successful.
| dTal wrote:
| I think it's criminal how little research is being done in
| this area. Sustainable, closed ecosystems are very likely
| to be key to humanity's future survival and are a
| prerequisite for leaving Earth on any kind of long term
| basis.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| I visited there in 1999. After the original experiment
| failed, it ended up used by Columbia University for research
| and a friend of mine from high school was a student there.
| She and I drove all the way from LA to Oracle, AZ to pick up
| a friend of hers doing a summer course there, stayed a few
| days, and he came back to LA to spent the rest of the summer
| with us.
|
| Years later, in the Army, I was struck by how similar the
| permanent living structures at the National Training Center
| are to those at Biosphere II. At least structurally. The
| students get real rooms whereas we got cots and tape on the
| floor. Another thing that struck me at NTC was how similar
| the landscape looked to any pictures I've ever seen of Mars.
| If NASA wants maximum fidelity, don't just put these people
| in a closed room, but do it underground in Death Valley.
| devchix wrote:
| I was going to mention this. Here's The Atlantic write-up on
| the project:
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/11/hi-seas-...
|
| The podcast was pretty entertaining and enlightening, and not
| too long. 6 (untrained) people in close quarters and isolation
| for a long time seems a recipe for mayhem. I know astronauts do
| long stints but they're trained and supported by people who
| share their purpose.
| notRobot wrote:
| Came here to mention this, it's a fun podcast to binge in a
| day/night.
| pseingatl wrote:
| How much law to take with?
|
| marslegalcode.org
| fuoqi wrote:
| Looks similar to the joint Russian/EU experiment MARS-500:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MARS-500
| exo-pla-net wrote:
| Better source: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/nasa-is-recruiting-
| for-yearlong...
|
| To qualify, you must be:
|
| * A U.S. citizen or permanent resident.
|
| * A non-smoker, age 30 to 55 years old, and proficient in
| English.
|
| * A viable candidate as an actual astronaut. For this, you
| usually need a master's degree in a STEM field, or you need to be
| a pilot or doctor or military officer.
| _moof wrote:
| You must also pass the medical screening, which prohibits a
| laundry list of common medications:
|
| - blood pressure medications
|
| - blood thinners
|
| - seizure medications
|
| - daily allergy medications
|
| - diabetic insulin daily
|
| - sleeping aids
|
| - ADHD/ADD medications
|
| - antidepressants
|
| - anxiety medications
|
| (Insert grumbling about "flight surgeon horseshit" here.)
| mbrumlow wrote:
| Gattaca Here we come!
| closeparen wrote:
| I don't think my seasonal allergies are going to be a problem
| in space.
| throwaway803453 wrote:
| You'll be growing crops year round, indoors. So you could
| be miserable. Curious if they select for plant strains that
| give off less pollen.
| hinkley wrote:
| I have idiopathic allergies and mold and mildew drive me
| absolutely batty.
|
| There's really no way to avoid bringing those with you,
| and if the humidity control isn't just right, well then
| that stuff can grow anywhere that humidity accumulates.
| And it's not like you can open the windows and scrub the
| place down every six months to keep it at bay.
| KMnO4 wrote:
| When all crops will be (presumably) manually pollinated,
| it might be easier with plants that produce a lot of
| pollen.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > A U.S. citizen or permanent resident.
|
| I guess I'll have to wait for the ESA version...
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Every time they run one of these similations they ignore the
| common realworld analogue: sailors. All around the world are
| tiny communities of mostly men living inside metal boxes for
| months or years at a time. Historic voyages regularly lasted
| even longer than the proposed mars missions, and where much
| more dangerous. Astronaughts could learn much from common
| sailors.
| awsthro00945 wrote:
| It doesn't seem like they ignore it. Sailors might be a
| decent analogue for astronauts while isolated within a space
| vessel, but that's not what this experiment is. NASA wants to
| research the environment while on a Martian surface mission,
| including doing stuff like suiting up in spacesuits to go do
| work outside, deal with communication delays, and having
| research responsibilities.
|
| It's somewhat similar to being confined on a sailing ship,
| but is still different, and the minute details really matter
| for something like this.
| sorenn111 wrote:
| You can even take it a step further to the subset of sailors
| that operate on submarines.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Military is different. Those are much larger crews and dont
| spend as much time at sea, generally only a few months at a
| time.
| madaxe_again wrote:
| Depends on your military, I guess. I know in the U.K. 9
| months isn't an unusual deployment for a submariner, and
| a few months underwater isn't unusual either.
|
| Isolation is pretty much their number one challenge.
| Machines are easier to keep running than minds.
| ffitch wrote:
| I think it's not about proving that the long isolation is
| possible, but rather about carrying this experiment in a
| controlled environment and doing a study.
| aasasd wrote:
| E.g.:
|
| > _The ship, without a mast or a rudder, was carried across
| the northern Pacific Ocean by currents. It drifted for 14
| months, during which the crew lived on desalinated seawater
| and on the rice of their cargo._
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otokichi
| ransom1538 wrote:
| "The Makah took the three survivors of the broken ship and
| held them as slaves for several months before taking them
| to Fort Vancouver."
|
| ^ Their story only got worse! The tribe turned them into
| slaves.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Makah
| aasasd wrote:
| I know there are different gradations of slavery, but I'd
| take working for food and shelter over fourteen months of
| rice and water. Especially seeing as eleven of fourteen
| men outright died on rice and water.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| These people usually make good money and often _need_ to make
| good money, because they have families and mortgages.
|
| It won't be easy to find people fulfilling all that criteria
| (including health requirements) and willing to leave a good job
| for a year.
| amelius wrote:
| Perhaps ask Jeff Bezos? :)
| dylan604 wrote:
| Jeff is currently too occupied sueing NASA for not giving him
| money to use a space craft he hasn't built yet. Then again,
| maybe NASA should select him as he can't be doing too much
| suing if he's sequestered for a year.
| okareaman wrote:
| They should recruit from submariners. I spent two months
| underwater and didn't mind it.
| graderjs wrote:
| Some of the questions (re military, specops and confined
| spaces) seems to suggest they're willing to do just that.
| sockfish wrote:
| Can I volunteer Elon Musk?
| sandworm101 wrote:
| A pilot, a doctor, and a military officer are all living together
| in an RV for a year. Who does the cleaning?
| driverdan wrote:
| I don't see anything about compensation. How much do they pay?
| Considering the requirements they should very pay well for
| something like this.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| I'm guessing that compensation is no better than it would be
| for astronauts (GS-13 or so, around $100k)
| dayyan wrote:
| Already did in last year.
| launchiterate wrote:
| The new season of Big Brother sponsored by SpaceX.
| slim wrote:
| UV b erry Dr' h fwdir. Ft optDr
| alessandroetc wrote:
| Seeking to extend the isolation of COVID life? Well, you're in
| luck. Apply now!
| ArcticCelt wrote:
| >NASA is calling for applicants interested in spending a year in
| a 1,700 square foot habitat
|
| For some people like me that is called an upgrade from last year.
| fnord77 wrote:
| "Biosphere 2 Part Deux, The Perchlorate Threat"
| ourmandave wrote:
| I spent the last year during the pandemic living alone and
| growing potatoes. Where do I apply?
| mychannel wrote:
| Because they have produced Oxygen on Mars
|
| Source: https://sirelonmusk.com/nasa-produced-oxygen-on-mars-for-
| the...
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(page generated 2021-08-07 23:01 UTC)