Most people visit Hawaii to lounge on the beach, soak up the sun, and bask in the beauty of the islands. A group of six researchers, however, voluntarily spent the last year living with limited resources on top of a Hawaiian mountain in near isolation inside a Mars simulation.
The group consisted of a French astrobiologist, a German physicist, and four Americans: a pilot, a journalist, a soil scientist, and an architect. Experts estimate a human mission to Mars could take one to three years, and the study, funded by NASA and run by the University of Hawaii, focused on the toll a long space exploration would take on a person. For comparison, the typical International Space Station mission only lasts about six months.
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