NASA is preparing for a Mars mission by locking people inside a cramped dome


Six people are going to spend the next year of their lives locked inside a tiny dome — for science. The isolation experiment, which started Friday, is NASA's latest and longest attempt at evaluating what interpersonal conflicts would be like during a trip to Mars, which is expected to take one to three years.
Based in Hawaii near a barren volcano, the team will live in isolation together with almost no privacy, Engadget reports. They'll survive in cramped living quarters on basic foods — we're talking canned tuna and powdered cheese.
So, who are these brave souls voluntarily participating in the worst possible Hawaiian vacation? A French astrobiologist, a German physicist, and an American pilot, soil scientist, architect, and a journalist. Technically, team members are allowed to leave the dome on occasion, but not without donning spacesuits first.
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
A free daily email with the biggest news stories of the day – and the best features from TheWeek.com
Julie Kliegman is a freelance writer based in New York. Her work has appeared in BuzzFeed, Vox, Mental Floss, Paste, the Tampa Bay Times and PolitiFact. Her cats can do somersaults.
-
August 23 editorial cartoons
Cartoons Saturday's political cartoons include deficit dimness, steamroller-in-chief, and more
-
5 museum-grade cartoons about Trump's Smithsonian purge
Cartoons Artists take on institutional rebranding, exhibit interpretation, and more
-
Settling the West Bank: a death knell for a Palestine state?
In the Spotlight The reality on the ground is that the annexation of the West Bank is all but a done deal
-
Hurricanes are not exclusive to Earth. They can happen in space.
Under the radar These storms may cause navigational problems
-
Rabbits with 'horns' sighted across Colorado
speed read These creatures are infected with the 'mostly harmless' Shope papilloma virus
-
Lithium shows promise in Alzheimer's study
Speed Read Potential new treatments could use small amounts of the common metal
-
Scientists discover cause of massive sea star die-off
Speed Read A bacteria related to cholera has been found responsible for the deaths of more than 5 billion sea stars
-
'Thriving' ecosystem found 30,000 feet undersea
Speed Read Researchers discovered communities of creatures living in frigid, pitch-black waters under high pressure
-
Answers to how life on Earth began could be stuck on Mars
Under the Radar Donald Trump plans to scrap Nasa's Mars Sample Return mission – stranding test tubes on the Red Planet and ceding potentially valuable information to China
-
New York plans first nuclear plant in 36 years
Speed Read The plant, to be constructed somewhere in upstate New York, will produce enough energy to power a million homes
-
The treasure trove of platinum on the moon
Under the radar This kind of bounty could lead to commercial exploitation