A crew of four research volunteers stepped inside NASA’s CHAPEA (Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog) habitat on Oct. 19, marking the start of the agency’s second 378-day simulated Mars mission.
Ross Elder, Ellen Ellis, Matthew Montgomery, and James Spicer are living and working inside the roughly 1,700-square-foot 3D-printed habitat at the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston until Oct. 31, 2026.
“The information and lessons learned through CHAPEA will inform real-life mission planning, vehicle and surface habitat designs, and other resources NASA needs to support crew health and performance as we venture beyond low-Earth orbit,” said Sara Whiting, Human Research Program project scientist. “Through these lessons, NASA’s Human Research Program is reducing human health and performance risks of spaceflight to enable safe and successful crewed missions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond.”
The crew will face the challenges of a real Mars mission, and only leave to perform simulated “Marswalk” activities directly outside the habitat, wearing spacesuits, to traverse a simulated Mars environment filled with red sand. During these Marswalks, they will remain isolated within the building that houses CHAPEA at NASA Johnson.
“These crewmembers will help provide foundational data for mission planning and vehicle design and inform trades between resources, methods, and technologies that best support health and performance within the constraints of living on Mars,” said Grace Douglas, CHAPEA principal investigator. “The information gained from these simulated missions is critical to NASA’s goal of sending astronauts to explore Mars.”
During the year ahead, the crew will complete a variety of activities designed to replicate life and work on a long-duration mission on Mars, including high-tempo simulated Marswalks, robotic operations, habitat maintenance, physical exercise, and crop cultivation. The mission also aims to investigate how the crew adapts and responds to various environmental stressors that may arise during a real Martian mission, including limited access to resources, prolonged isolation, 22-minute communication delays, and equipment failures. Researchers will study how the team manages these conditions, which will inform future protocols and plans ahead of future crewed missions to Mars.
The first CHAPEA mission, which took place in the same habitat, concluded on July 6, 2024.
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NASA’s Human Research Program
NASA’s Human Research Program pursues methods and technologies to support safe, productive human space travel. Through science conducted in laboratories, ground-based analogs, commercial missions, the International Space Station and Artemis missions, the program scrutinizes how spaceflight affects human bodies and behaviors. Such research drives the program’s quest to innovate ways that keep astronauts healthy and mission ready as human space exploration expands to the Moon, Mars, and beyond.
