Scientists don spacesuits to explore Hawaiian lava tubes as if they were on

Think about attempting to choose up a pebble or scrape microbes off a cave wall in a cumbersome spacesuit with puffy gloves on, below a time constraint since you don’t need to run out of oxygen. That’s what the analog astronauts do each day on the HI-SEAS moonbase habitat in Hawaii as they put together for future missions to the moon and Mars, says Michaela Musilova of the Worldwide MoonBase Alliance (IMA) and director of HI-SEAS, the Hawaii Area Exploration Analog and Simulation.

Musilova will current the newest on her workforce’s analysis on Hawaiian lava tubes, and the challenges of attempting to do analysis in spacesuits, this week on the European Geosciences Union (EGU) Common Meeting 2021.

HI-SEAS is an analog lunar and Martian habitat and analysis station situated excessive on the volcano Mauna Loa, on Hawaii’s Large Island. There, researchers dwell and work for days to months at a time, solely going exterior to carry out experiments or clamber about in lava tubes, and solely of their hefty Further-Vehicular Exercise (EVA) analog spacesuits simply as they would if they were on the moon or Mars. The 110-square-meter (1,200-square-foot) habitat is the astronauts’ residence, fitness center, lab—and every part else—whereas they’re on a “mission.”

Lava tubes, like these discovered on Mauna Loa, are vital to explore in these EVA spacesuits, as a result of lava tubes on Mars and the moon can even be vital to explore. Lava tubes on Mars are essential targets for analysis into astrobiology as they are thought to maintain biosignatures of life, very similar to caves and a few lava tubes on Earth do. In the meantime, lava tubes on the moon might serve as shelters for potential human settlements. However lava tubes are usually not straightforward to explore—and that’s particularly the case for analog astronauts in spacesuits.

“Doing analysis in fits below EVA constraints makes every part far more troublesome to do, and all of it takes thrice longer,” Musilova says. “We’d like to practice extensively on Earth to determine the perfect strategies and create the perfect EVA fits in order that we’ll have the ability to carry out this sort of analysis on the moon and Mars someday,” she says.

The volcanic panorama of Mauna Loa is analogous to what we see on the moon and Mars, says Bernard Foing, govt director of the Worldwide Lunar Exploration Working Group EuroMoonMars mission. Foing can be a part of IMA and can current analysis from the EuroMoonMars mission explorations at HI-SEAS and a number of other different websites, together with Iceland, Chile’s Atacama Desert, and the Utah desert, on the EGU assembly throughout the similar session on Wednesday, 28 April. These analog areas permit the workforce “to check applied sciences we are able to ship to area” and to check “coaching and capability constructing for researchers and explorers,” Foing says.

The HI-SEAS crewmembers—future astronaut candidates in coaching—are attempting to determine what works, and what doesn’t work, right here on Earth to put together for future area missions. A crew at HI-SEAS runs a mission identical to they would in area: crew roles embrace a commander, operations officer, engineer, and science communication officer, plus specialists for specific experiments or initiatives, like crew biologists to check for biofilms in lava tubes or to assist run experiments just like the latest LettuceGrow experiment, by which the workforce examined methods to develop lettuce contained in the habitat.

Crew members, together with individuals from all around the world from various backgrounds and talking completely different languages, spend all their time collectively throughout the mission, simply as they would on the moon or Mars, Musilova says. “There’s a lot we nonetheless want to study, together with about how people work together below these difficult situations,” she says.

Supply:DOI: 10.5194/egusphere-egu21-14600                  https://www.egu.eu/

Scientists don spacesuits to explore Hawaiian lava tubes as if they were on Mars

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