Life in a Mars Simulation with Kelly Haston

0:00Chuck, I love talking to folks with NASA. Yeah, man. Because NASA's in our culture. Yes. And it's not just a telescope showing a picture. They're people. I mean, there's no wonder that they are the most popular branch of taxpayer-funded government activity. And one of the most recognizable brands there ever was. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. And the fact is that we found out that you don't have to go to Mars to go to Mars. That's what I like. Coming up, life in a Mars habitat on StarTalk. Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

0:46This is StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. Of course, I'm here with Chuck Knight. Hey, what's happening, Neil? All right, very nice, very good. You've been doing all right? You know, actually, I've been doing very well. Yeah. Okay. This has been a great time the past few months. Thank you for asking. No, no, good. I'm very happy right now. We got to keep our comedians happy. Well, that's an oxymoron right now. Happy comedian. That's kind of the job of everybody. We got to make sure you're ready for the gigs. Right. Right. So, you know what we're going to talk about today?

1:22What? Simulating Mars. Oh, my goodness. I know. Well, we're supposedly, get your eyes to Mars. you know we're supposedly going there at some point so we should simulate it here so we figure out what we're going to be in for figure that out yeah i have no expertise whatsoever in this okay so we found commander kelly hasten kelly welcome to star talk hi it's nice to be here yeah so you're you're commander of what so i was the commander of the first of three simulated mars missions with NASA. So even though you didn't fly through the vacuum of space, they still got to call you commander because the whole mission was simulated.

2:05Yes. Yes. I know. How lucky is that? I was going to say, does that make you a simulated commander? Yes. Yes. I'm an analog commander. Okay. You have a PhD in biomedical sciences. That's exactly the kind, you know, that's who you want that's yeah that's uh in a mars right habitat that's very mark watney of you but they didn't leave her for dead on mars and she's still on earth it's a good simulation too so we're talking about nasa's chapia mission did i pronounce that correctly yes yes chapia this is reads like one of those tortured acronyms but take me through it so chapia and i i will uh it's it's The crew health and it's basically going to evaluate the health and performance of a crew in a one year Mars mission.

2:59So the idea behind it is to put people into a simulation where you can actually test how the isolation and resource restriction, including food, communication, water, all sorts of things that you any kind of resource that you can imagine that you would need on a Mars mission is actually in limited amounts. and you have three four people actually basically pretending to be on mars and doing all the activities associated with uh keeping a habitat functioning and doing science while they are actually on a mission now you know in other parts of the military we call that enhanced interrogation no no you know what it is it's a test to see if they'll kill each other that's all it is that's that's a great reality show they have to yes that is a great reality show but they have to leave their weapons outside i think maybe so chapia i have here crew health and performance exploration analog wow okay yeah and it sounds like something you would put in yogurt like i'm so healthy i put so much chapia in my yogurt so so where did this take place it took place in a hangar on johnson space center in a 3d printed habitat.

4:13Wow. So this is in Johnson Space Center in Houston. In Houston, Texas. That's right. So it was 3D printed to simulate maybe what you would do on Mars. You have to print up anything you need. You can't carry it there, right? You can't carry it and you need to use the materials that are possibly present. So obviously regolith, which is a soil that is going to be on the Martian surface, is a potential substrate that you could use to actually print something. Other options, of course, are to be - But just to be clear, regolith, when we think, we loosely say Martian soils, but soil has a very strict meaning on Earth, which Mars does not have.

4:51So what's the difference between soil and regolith? Well, there's going to be mineral content differences. So Mars is actually made up of the same minerals as the Earth, but it has different components, different proportions. So you're going to have different proportions of minerals present. you're also going to have a lack of moisture because mars is does have some water in the ice caps and potentially underground which is pretty exciting but it does not actually have water content easily available on the surface the way our soil would have you know water content so therefore it doesn't support a biota in the soil itself correct okay so that's why mark watney right had to get uh he made poop potatoes right yeah he couldn't just grow it in the in the soils Right, because isn't a lot of the soil ironed?

5:36What do you do with that? Well, you can't do a lot with it other than actually build a habitat. So you can actually potentially use it to create a habitat that might actually be both protective from environments and also potentially protective from radiation as well. So that's something that I think - Construction material, that's great. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. How long were you there? We were there for 378 days. Damn. Oh. That's intense. Whoa. Yeah. Now who do you hate most? Let's be honest. Cause you know, it's like day three and you're just like, Oh my God, this dude's an a-hole. So there's four of you.

6:13Who are the other three? You can name them. Yeah. So we had flight engineer, Ross Brockwell, who is a structural engineer. We had our, yeah. And we had our medical officer, uh, Nathan Jones, who is an ER doc. So, so really versed in emergency medicine. And then we had our science officer, Anka Solario, who is actually a microbiologist who works for the Navy right now. Wow. All right. So this is, and combined with your background, you guys can make anything happen. Sounds like the nerdiest heist crew ever. It's like a heist movie with the nerdiest crew ever, which is awesome. There was significant levels of nerd.

6:55I can't lie. Yeah, no, that's, and nerds know how to hang out. We love that. So before we get into some of the nitty gritty of this, I'm a big fan of the Twilight Zone series going back to the late 1950s, actually. The original. The original. The original. Not the Jordan Peele version. Well, maybe I haven't seen it yet. I can't comment. You know, you don't like it. Okay. Okay, fine. I'm sorry. So that, if we remember, was the dawn of the space age. Right. And many of the episodes were made before anyone had been yet launched into space. But we knew it was coming. And there were multiple episodes of astronauts that are just alone in space.

7:42And they're exploring the psychological damage that can bring from being away from other humans. And it wasn't until I was older that I realized, you know, there's long stretches of time. I don't want to be around anybody. Oh, yes. And I'm a sociable person. So clearly they're like hermits out there where this would not be an issue at all. Right. Or fathers. And NASA's always yapping at you anyway. All right. So this idea of isolation, is it as devastating as these psychological dramas would have us think? You know, one of the questions that comes up is how isolating is it truly to be on a mission like this?

8:23Or how isolating will it be? That's what it's testing, right? How are people going to handle this? And I will say that it's both incredibly isolating at times and also an opportunity to get closer to people. And so amazingly, I feel like actually many of my relationships deepen during this period because there was less. So first of all, NASA does speak to us all the time. There was a significant delay. Well, the good news is they could only type because there was a time delay of significant time delay across the mission based on how far Mars was from Earth during the whole mission up to 22 minutes one way.

9:00So at the height of our time delay, it took 22 minutes for a message to get to us and 22 minutes for us to send an answer back or vice versa. This is the time delay of radio waves moving through the vacuum of space. Right. Right. So it was no witty repartee with NASA. and why use i'm asking you both why use radio why not use like some kind of laser communication all light it doesn't make a difference because it's all the same speed same speed no matter what same speed right correct right okay so so they built that in even though you're just sitting right there in houston they built in the time delay absolutely and and data size also comes into play there so it's not just actually sending something but how large you're sending so the larger the item so if you're going to send an audio file or a video file or even a picture that's going to take longer than just a typed message.

9:45So you have all sorts of limitations there that you have to sort of take into account when you're sending a message. So we had communication with NASA, which was delayed for the same amount of time as our emails, but our emails would also take into account generally size. So yes, we did actually have communication with NASA. We had a schedule that NASA set up for us daily. We followed that schedule similar to astronauts on the ISS. We basically checkmarked our things off the same way they did. We followed a red line of sort of timeline and had to do things in a timely fashion. But we also would have to communicate back to them sometimes.

10:21Or if we were troubleshooting, we'd have to ask them for help. And then we'd have to wait for it. We'd either have to troubleshoot it ourselves or wait for that 22 minutes to hear back from them for what their answer was. But that's a great way to get yourself 22 minutes if you want. They ask you a question and you just write that, please clarify, and then go have some coffee. just a delay yeah exactly i don't understand please repeat i didn't quite get that and it's like all right guys you know now it's time for some maxwell house a badly behaved crew would potentially do that but we would have never done anything like that to you know sort of follow our own solution while waiting for nasa to let us know what to do but but we did become quite autonomous in our responses and then in terms of communicating with your family as well, there was that delay.

11:11And also, things like video were very intensely data-heavy, so hard to do for more than a minute or two. You really relied on emails and audios. But you did get to talk to people in that way, talk, I guess, in quotes. And so, you spent more time than you normally did communicating with people, but you actually put a lot into it. And my friends and family were amazing in that they gave me this richness of communication that I've referenced a few times where they really stepped up to a form that we don't use anymore very often and communicated with me in this way and supported me through the mission.

11:45And it was actually, I ended up learning things about people that I didn't know yet. So now let me ask you this, and this may seem a bit juvenile, but I just got to ask, I'm not saying that it happened. I just want to know what NASA's policy is. when it comes to, you know, a little like a romance happening between the crew members? Are there any guidelines? Like you find yourself having some warm feelings about somebody on the crew? What happens in something? Because you're spending a year with these people. What happens in that case? NASA probably didn't. I can't speak for NASA. I can tell you that they did give us some information about that.

12:26And one thing, and I'm not sure if I'm supposed to say this, but I will say that pregnancy was an out. Like you did not get pregnant on this. You were not supposed to get pregnant on this mission. And so I would imagine, given that it was Earth-based, if you did get pregnant, they would have removed you from the mission, potentially. I'm hypothesizing on this based on information maybe that I was given. We were also, the majority of us were partnered. So that would create some problems on Earth. if you did get warm, fuzzy feelings about someone there. So I think that, again, you're in a professional setting and humans are humans and professional settings lead to relationships all the time.

13:07So I'm sure that that could happen at some point and we were lucky enough not to deal with anything like that. However, I don't know if, once we're in there, once you're on an analog where you're pretending to be on Mars, you're on Mars. And unless somebody gets hurt, they can't really step in. They're going to let the mission go unless certain things do happen that they've outlined ahead of time. So I would say, luckily, we didn't have those issues. But it brings up something that I'm actually really interested in, in future thoughts around analogs and also real missions, which is, is it better to send partners?

13:40There's a huge issue with sending partners in terms of crew dynamic. But in terms of human happiness, there's actually a reason to think about sending families or, or, or, you know, units of people, because you, you know, if you're going on a three-year mission, a one-year mission is actually relatively short. Mars is going to be longer. And, and so thinking about how we can send couples may actually be a viable way to keep people happier. Although admittedly, that's going to have to be a crew that comes together beforehand. And, and there's, there's other inherent dangers in, in crew dynamic that come up when you think about sending couples.

14:14You're finding that out. You're finding that out. Yeah, yeah. However, I would love to see at least one experiment where that happens, where you have couples, because I just want to see that type back to mission control, which is, can we get a more comfortable couch sent up here? Nine months typically is a journey to Mars. You were not simulating the ride to Mars. You were simulating your time on Mars. But getting back to the pregnancy issue, there was a movie about this. Really? It was called, I think, The Space Between Us. Okay. Yeah, there was a woman who got pregnant the night before she flew to Mars.

14:53Oh. And then she delivers on arrival to Mars because it's a nine-month mission. Right? And so, but NASA had to keep the whole thing. So this was a child born and no one knew about the child. Ooh. And so the child grew up on Mars in 40 % gravity. Ooh. And there was a whole story. A secret Mars baby. Of course, baby. I love it. It was interesting.

15:28Hello, I'm Alexander Harvey, and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson.

15:46how much square footage did you guys occupy oh 1700 square feet no and then what what i'm done okay sorry okay that was four people and you didn't that was the habitat that was the habitat we did have outdoor area that we went out into and when we mimicked mars walks um that was obviously in an outfit where we were you know mimicking a space suit so we did actually have a little i call it going outside i loved going outside but but our habitat which we were in sometimes for weeks at a time we didn't go outside all the time so um yes 1700 square feet all right so when they go out that's when they sneak to mcdonald's yeah she didn't say where they went oh simulating you're in houston girl guys guys i'm going on another mars walk how come you always come back from the mars walk with ketchup on your suit what's up so so 1700 square feet you could easily put four people in that living in a manhattan apartment yeah but you get to exit the apartment multiple times a day which is why new york city streets are so crowded because there's a bunch of people living in these tiny little mars bases it's not an impossible area that i can imagine putting four people right but when you have the urge to go on a Mars walk, where in Houston do you go?

17:10Are you walking down down like the street with a Mars or they have a, like a campus where this happens? So within right attached to our habitat, we actually had an area that was covered over and made to look like Mars. So we actually exited the habitat, but stayed within a defined area. And we use two different mechanisms. We used virtual reality. So we actually had goggles and a treadmill that we got on. And we were able to go and do activities associated with scientific activities and also maintenance activities that you would expect to do. So we actually went outside, but - Wait, wait, just when you said goggles, you mean VR goggles?

17:49VR goggles, exactly. Yeah, like a whole VR rig, like, you know, with hand controllers and pucks for your feet. Gotcha, gotcha. And the treadmill is to pretend like you were actually walking great distances. So you can cover ground. Cover ground. I mean, at this point, I've walked miles on Mars. Yeah. Oh, that's super cool, actually. But it does kind of feel like a little Truman Show-y. It is, yeah. Yeah. What was your sky and your horizon? So in VR, the realism was excellent. Like it was the VR team was amazing and they put together a really beautiful package and set of activities for us that we got to do.

18:26The non-VR was a little less realism because obviously you're in a hangar in Houston that's pretending to be part of Mars, you know, in a little area, but it actually wasn't bad. Like it was really the activities we were given, the builds that we were given, the different activities that we had to do outside, um, uh, combined with the outfit that we wore did really sort of give you the sense again, without the environmental issues of Mars. So we, we were lacking that, but like, you know, so you can't, you're not going to mimic the ground, the difference in gravity or the difference in air. You could put a joist on all of you, right.

18:59To make you just a little bit lighter. Yeah, they could have done that. You're right. And we did have aspects of like, I think, again, what we I always think about analogs is what are they trying to ask here? They were trying to mimic the workload that would stress us out and or tire us out or be the thing that actually made you physically or mentally tired. They were not actually, you know, trying out, you know, equipment for an actual Mars mission. So, you know, we were we were addressing very specific things and that was not in the scope. So, but that would be really, really cool. You can imagine another such mission, an analog mission, where it's just for the gravity part.

19:37Yeah. And that would be amazing, right? To really try that out and see how that would feel. But you would have to rig both outside and inside. It would be, you know, resource-wise, it would be quite a heavy lift for no pun intended. On Mars, you'd be about 60 pounds. Is that right? Yeah. That sounds about right. Yeah. So you'd have a very different experience. I've got to get to Mars as quickly as I can. my goodness that's not how it works you don't leave the fat behind what does mars do for man boobs because that's where i'm really having the problem uh so uh so of course you're in a hangar so you never exit the hangar even when you go out on your walks now i figured that out i mean we didn't see anyone we didn't hear the people outside of like even though i i mean it's it's the weirdest feeling right you enter this habitat and you enter this space that you're going to be living in for 378 days.

20:29But, and you know that mission control is in a wall, just a few, few doors down from you. And yet you don't see them for a year. You don't speak to them directly for a year. You don't hear them because they're being quiet. Like what a, what a, what an incredible labor of love they did, which is they, they spent a year working in a place where they had to be bone quiet, like just so quiet so that they didn't actually interfere with the mission at all. So it's a really strange, like, I mean, analogs are really funny that way because you have to buy into it on both sides, right? The ground has to be the ground, the mission in space or on a planet has to be the mission.

21:03And so it's actually a really, it's a very real thing. As a scientist, I can tell you that like, it's, it's a really interesting thing to see, like all of us drop into it and then like experience it. And everybody had different approaches and different ways to deal with it. But we all did, you know, do our best to, to do the mission as if it was real, so that we were giving the best possible data to NASA because that's the key, right? Why else are you giving a year of your life up? At any point psychologically, do you begin to believe the cosplay? I was going to ask that. That you are involved in.

21:37You're actually on Mars. Right. And you don't want to actually exit because that could mess up your brain. Do you actually go Daniel Day-Lewis on us and just like, you know, I'm actually here. I'm doing this, you know. I am Bill the Butcher. I can honestly say I did not. I wish I could say I did. I think it would have actually made it a really interesting experience as well. But I think you're always, it's almost impossible to turn your brain off and know that you're not on earth. There's just a number of differences, right? Like that you're not going to experience similar things. So you are aware of it, but you're also, you're so determined to do the mission in the way that it's set up that I think that you buy into the experience in a very deep way.

22:25Like the fact that we were this unit, this team that was functioning together and that we had to continue functioning together to do our work properly and so forth. And even to think about the work, right? Like doing science in this setting is not the way I do science normally, right? I do science and I actually produce particular types of data. Here, we were making data for the sake of actually producing data personally. So we were actually making science that, for want of a better word, didn't matter. It was creating data of a different sort. And it was kind of a layer that I... You're the data.

23:00You are the data. But really, I am doing the science is actually the data. Me doing the science is the data. And then, you know, capturing... It's very meta, actually. Yeah. And by the way, that was also a Twilight Zone episode. Really? Where there is an actor on a set. Okay. Who had such a miserable home life, but his acting role, he had a joyous family and loving kids and everything. And he just flipped one day and became the actor that he was acting. Wow. You know, and they took down the walls of the thing. He said, what are you doing? That's what happened. It was, the Twilight Zone been up and down these streets multiple times.

23:42A couple other things. The, I seem to remember some studies where they put people in a room where they could live whatever biorhythms was natural to them. I don't know if that's the right term. and when they did this they found that 24 hours was not a natural unit of people's um what do you call circadian rhythm of their rhythms that it was more like 25 and a half hours oh really so they so when they would left to their own their schedule shifted against so it made you wonder is our life and our 24 hour clock forcing us away from our what is natural so did you do Martian days or Earth days? Ooh.

24:30That's a great question. Yeah, the Martian day would be a little longer. So it would actually be perfect to that. It would actually speak to that study. We did not. And I can hypothesize a few reasons for that. Number one, when we do activities on our schedule, right, some of them can be autonomous, like cleaning the hab or doing maintenance on the hab or whatever, or our personal time, obviously. But there are other activities where we need an expert on the ground that's actually monitoring us in case there's troubleshooting to be had, right? So our time, and similar to anyone that's gonna go to space or do these trips, is also going to be dependent on the crew in Houston or whatever space station who's actually monitoring them.

25:12So we stayed to the Earth clock. No, no, I'm not buying that. No, no, because when we sent actual missions to Mars, the folks at jpl right have mark two clocks on their wrist and martian time and earth time yeah yeah how many souls are there that's right sol for sun sunday and so they're forced to match the circadian rhythms of the rovers so so make make houston's go on your schedule don't don't well i would say from the experience that i think that i and this is just my experience um not nasa's opinion of this, but I think having had this experience, that the crews that go to Mars are going to be far more autonomous than what NASA is used to.

25:57The time delay means you can't wait 45 minutes for an answer most of the time. You have to go forward with your troubleshooting solution unless it's something that can be put off and changed to a later time in the day after you've heard from them. So to be honest, I think that the environment and also the delay and the length of time that people are going to be there, I have a feeling it's going to be a very different style mission, even in what we're doing right now. So even though I think that they're, they're getting close to trying to actually answer questions about safety and health with analogs like this, by the time we go to Mars and actually have people living there, I think they're going to have like ironed out some of these things.

26:32And I have a feeling that people's biology is going to actually, you know, adapt and reign supreme. So in the end, I have a feeling that will probably be the case. Um, before our analog, we did stick to earth time. and so yes i would just if you're gonna put me away for a year you're gonna follow my schedule yeah i am the one that's up there i would get belligerent about it exactly yeah right so let me ask you when you said cleaning the hab like how do you guys divvy up those duties is it a group thing where you all get together like okay so and where do you put the dust that gets swept in the corner right yeah and what do you do if somebody's like kind of a slob just like jim how many times you're going to leave your space drawers in the middle of the doggone hab what's up man seriously we're all a unit here space drawers a different kind of draw so you had to you're self-sufficient right so food yeah washing clothes everything so we had everything so there was um uh there was a free supply in certain locations so we could get things delivered to us from those pre-supplied areas.

27:41We had depots that were potentially, so there were times where we retrieved things from those resupply areas. That's a simulation of what a supply ship would deposit. Exactly. On an uncrewed supply ship in a drop. Exactly. Yes. But there were instances and there were things where we just had everything we were going to have in the hub from the very start. And so right from the get-go for cleaning supplies, we, we inventoried them and we actually, we were tremendous. And I will be braggy about that a little bit and say like our crew had so much stuff left over because we really were like very resource.