Says Christian Heinicke. I’m part of a team that simulates life on Mars. Our home for the whole year is a housing with a diameter of 12 meters in the place where the simulation of space conditions in Hawaii, Mesopotamia on the slopes of Mauna Loa. We’ll be here until next August. The only people we see during this time, our crew of six.
As well we will be worked together for this year? Whether we become more or less sociable and willing to work together? We are all very different, and it’s not to cause conflicts. Therefore, we conduct part of his day, conducting experiments and answering questions the main research simulations on our group dynamics. We could say that we work together, but do so together, like we did last week?
Some of these experiments will include field work that we do in space suits. Have you ever been bundled up in the winter? Then you have a small idea of what it’s like to work in a spacesuit. It prevents you from all known methods: you will lose most of his mobility. Your field of vision is very limited. To all this, we are carrying heavy backpacks that maintain our life support system. The simplest tasks like get down on your knees and look at the stone close to take much more time than it should. Approaching your front panel to the stone is a difficult juggling act. To climb, we often need the help of their friends.
However, to be on the outside — a very pleasant change from staying inside the house all day, every day. Inside, we have to turn after every few steps. Outside we can walk almost in any direction almost as long as the battery our life support systems. Even if we only went by stone fields, their landscapes are very different from those that are visible in a single window of our living environment.
Life under the dome, as we call it, however, has its advantages. We don’t need to go shopping because all our products are stored in a large container. Our work is not interrupted by “urgent” phone calls. Our daily “jam” on the way from the bed to the desktop literally lasts less than a minute or two, if you run to the bathroom. You might think that we live like prisoners, but we are also working on their own projects when they want and how they want. The inability to talk to someone directly can be uncomfortable and time consuming, but every message from home is of particular value.
Do we feel as if you live on a real Mars station? Yes and no. Unlike the Martian sky, which is red and free of clouds, our sky is blue, and the clouds we see almost every day. If my suit gets torn, I will not die, and if you need medical help, I’m evacuating in a few hours. Difficult to confuse the planet with Mars, especially in those days when the wind and go on a rampage on the walls of our home will be lulling drumming of the rain.
Gala dinner under the dome
Often, though, the weather can not pay attention, and think more about the conditions of life: there are times when a 40-minute delay in communications between us and the centre support stretches forever but that is how much you will have to wait if you are on Mars, because of the great distances between the planets. Looking for information about how to fix something? Will have to wait, because on Mars will not be a simple “Google”. We have extensive electronic library, but any request for information which it does not possess, it is necessary to send to support center mission.
They usually respond quickly, but in the case of difficult requests may take a few options emails, until you explain the problem to get a useful answer. On Earth you would be enough to take the phone and your problem would be solved in less than an hour. But in “Mars” even simple problems can sometimes require a whole day for a solution.
And there’s Christmas, birthdays or just events in the lives of our loved ones, which we lack. I’m not the type of person who is constantly homesick, being far from him, so for me it’s not new. But the level is completely different: I have no choice to fly home to Germany for Christmas or to congratulate my mother a happy birthday on the phone.
Here we have a very unusual life. Of course, we exchange photos with family, to make them videos. However, personally, I feel uncomfortable speaking on camera. This is different.
And although I don’t consider your surroundings Mars, I feel that am away from my previous life, my family and my country. I live in a place away from home, where in December the sun is bright and hot, like summer. The vegetation around me seems completely unfamiliar, as I grew in other places.
The furthest from Earth I felt on November 13, the day of the attack on Paris. We read about him with the help of our Internet delay, and the events of that night seemed distant not only because of geographical distance. Life on “Earth” does not affect us, until we get back. We watch the news and political reports, but we have no way to know what people think on the street. It’s a strange feeling to watch the events in Europe from afar, passively. In this respect it seems really live on another planet.
Christian Heinicke, German physicist and engineer