IT IS the Big Brother house for the space age. Six scientists were locked away yesterday in a dome near a Hawaiian volcano where they will remain for a year.
The isolation experiment by Nasa, the US space agency, is the longest attempted and is designed to mimic the personal challenges that humans would face during a voyage to Mars. The six — three men and three women — will live in the 36ft-diameter, 20ft-tall dome, without fresh food or fresh air and with little privacy.
Each will have their own small room, with a sleeping cot and desk, and will eat food such as powdered cheese and canned tuna.
The dome is set in a remote area with little vegetation or wildlife and any journeys outside have to be approved by “ground control” and conducted wearing a space suit. The team will have only limited access to the internet.
The crew includes a French astrobiologist, a German physicist and four Americans — a pilot, an architect, a “doctor journalist” and a soil scientist.
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Sheyna Gifford, the medical crew member, described the team as “six people who want to change the world by making it possible for people to leave it at will”. The architect, Tristan Bassingthwaighte, said he was “hoping to learn a lot”.
Previous experiments have lasted up to eight months, during which conflicts broke out among team members. Nasa has declined to provide details of what caused them.
“I think one of the lessons is that you really can’t prevent interpersonal conflicts. It is going to happen over these long-duration missions, even with the very best people,” said Kim Binsted, a Nasa investigator. “But what you can do is help people be resilient so they respond well to the problems and can resolve them and continue to perform well as a team.”
Experts estimate that a human mission to Mars could take between one and three years.
Jocelyn Dunn, a crew member from a previous isolation experiment, reflected on the experience in a typically scientific way.
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“I guess I got a taste of marriage, albeit a hexagon of relationships rather than a dyad,” she said.