What Will It Be Like to Live in a Dome for 8 Months, Pretending It's Mars?
Martha Lenio, first woman to command a Mars simulation, describes the dome that will be her team's home as NASA studies the psychology of long-term missions.
On Wednesday, three men and three women will step inside a thousand-square-foot dome on the north side of the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii. For the next eight months, they will be cut off from the outside world. The team will simulate life at a space station on Mars as part of a project called HI-SEAS, sponsored by NASA and led by the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
The eight-month project is the second of three missions sponsored by NASA studying human performance on long-duration isolation missions. It's NASA's longest Mars simulation to date.
Martha Lenio, 34, of Canada, is the mission's commander and the first woman to lead a Mars simulation. She's the third woman in NASA's history to lead a
