Here’s What It Feels Like to Spend a Year on ‘Mars’
Dice games, dancing, and virtual family dinners helped the six members of the HI-SEAS project cope with isolation on a volcano's slopes.
Mauna Loa, HawaiiSheyna Gifford scoops up a handful of reddish volcanic rocks, buries her nose in it, and takes a long, deep breath.
“Wow,” she says. “There’s no planet like home.”
Gifford, a physician and journalist, just completed a yearlong simulated Mars mission that required her and five crewmates to live in a two-story dome placed 8,200 feet (2,500 meters) up the slopes of Mauna Loa—the fourth iteration of the Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation, or HI-SEAS, project.
Sunday, August 28, was the first time the crew had left Mars-on-Earth without spacesuits since last August. For 365.5 days, they worked together, lived together, cooked together, hunkered down and shivered through relentlessly chilly days together. No visits from friends, no phone calls
