Want to spend a year living in NASA's Mars simulation?

Have you ever wanted to be an astronaut without risking your life in space? If so, we have the perfect opportunity for you. NASA is calling for people https://www.nasa.gov/hrp/nasa-seeks-volunteers-for-yearlong-simulated-mission-to-moon-mars/ with a science background to apply for a simulated mission to the Moon and Mars. Four adults will spend a year isolated in two enclosures meant to simulate both traveling through deep space and living on Mars. Learn whether you fit the profile and what NASA researchers hope to learn from the mission in this episode. Interested in more space news? Email us your question at [email protected] mailto:[email protected] and we may cover it in an upcoming segment. Support public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. It includes perks like bonus episodes, early access, archive access, curated playlists and sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org http://plus.npr.org. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

• 0:00Speaker 00

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  You're listening to Short Wave from NPR.

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  Hey, Short Waveers. Regina Barber here, and you know what time it is. It's time for us to talk space news for a whole episode. It's Spacing Out with Gina. Here today is my co-host, my fellow co-creator and space cadet from All Things Considered, Scott Detrow.

• 0:39Speaker 02

  So excited to be back. Favorite time of the month, let's space out.

• 0:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, OK. And joining us, Scott, is a newcomer NPR science correspondent, Ari Daniel. Welcome, Ari.

• 0:48Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 0:49Speaker 01

  And to start, did you know that in space, no one can hear you scream?

• 0:53Speaker 03

  But here on Earth, in the room next door, my cat can.

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  Ari, welcome to Spacing Out.

• 0:59Speaker 03

  Oh, I'm so glad to be here.

• 1:00Speaker 01

  It's gonna be great, I promise, Ari. OK, we're gonna talk about NASA's recruitment of volunteers to simulate a year-long mission to the moon and then Mars. I have a question for both of you, though. Would either of you do this simulation, like, a year-long simulation?

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  I think I would hold out for actually going to Mars if I was going to.

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  Would you really want to go? Oh, my gosh, not me.

• 1:23Speaker 02

  I mean, I would be more interested in that than pretending to go to Mars in Texas.

• 1:27Speaker 01

  Fair. What about you, Ari? Would you simulate going to the moon then Mars?

• 1:32Speaker 03

  I don't think you could get me to do it either. I just feel like to clear the calendar for that long of a time, to go to Houston, you know, I'd be happy to go to Houston for like, a weekend, but--

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  Right, not a year, though.

• 1:47Speaker 03

  A year.

• 1:48Speaker 01

  In a room.

• 1:48Speaker 03

  In an enclosure might be a hard sell.

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  So I would miss my family too much. And honestly, like, even being with them for a few days and like, not going to work and not leaving the house turned me into a monster, so I am not the person to recruit for these missions.

• 2:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, I guess I will say there's blips of time where I'm like, this would seem appealing to just kind of hide for a year. But yeah, I think it would get old quickly.

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  Yeah, I'm not, I don't think I would be a team person after a week.

• 2:17Speaker 03

  Well, does sugar help, Gina? Because I'm bringing you and Scott a story about sugar molecules found in space. How about that for a segue?

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  You did amazing, Ari. I loved it. I appreciate it. OK, and we'll end this spacing out party with a story about a spacecraft that just woke up on the edge of our solar system.

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  Rise and shine.

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  So today on the show, we got isolation, sugar, and the edge of our solar system. Real heady stuff.

• 2:46Speaker 02

  This is existential.

• 2:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. You're listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.

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• 4:24Speaker 01

  OK, Scott, Ari, should we start with human isolation?

• 4:29Speaker 02

  I mean, no bigger question. But what I'm wondering is, if these astronauts are not actually astronauts because they're not going to Mars, what exactly is it that NASA is focusing on here?

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  Well, right now, people can apply to join a year-long, four-person simulated mission to the moon and Mars. It'll take place at the Johnson Space Center in Houston and could start as soon as August of next year.

• 4:55Speaker 02

  These people are, of course, not actually going to the moon or Mars, though. So what is it that they're doing when they don't leave Houston?

• 5:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, so they spend most of their time isolated in a 650-ish square-foot enclosure, and they're simulating travel through deep space. And for two months in the middle, they'll move to a different, slightly bigger structure to simulate surface living on Mars.

• 5:18Speaker 03

  And this structure will have areas for sleeping, recreation, work, medical and food areas, plus an airlock and a place to grow crops. They'll do science experiments and test out protocols for living and working in deep space, but there's one big difference from actually being in space. They'll still be living under Earth's gravity.

• 5:40Speaker 02

  And that's one of the things that scientists wonder about long-term, long-distance space travel, is how being in zero gravity or low gravity that long affects your body. Since that can't be tested out, what exactly is it that NASA is hoping to learn here?

• 5:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, so one of the big objectives is to understand how the crew deals with stress and isolation. Will they all get along? And how will they handle such long-term separation from their loved ones? One thing they'll test is how the crew deals with communication delays, because depending on where Mars is in the orbit, it could take a hello 20 minutes to get to Earth and 20 minutes to hear back, which also means no instant communication with mission control.

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  In current and past real-life missions, astronauts have been able to talk to loved ones or mission control in real time. But a Mars mission could last two to three years, so they'll be dealing with these communication delays for a while.

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  I think it's fair to say it takes a special kind of person to volunteer for a not-real space mission for a year. And I'm just imagining the conversations with your spouse or kids, like, hey, I'm going to Mars, and by Mars, I mean this fake Mars.

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  I mean Houston.

• 6:45Speaker 02

  This room. So I mean, but like, but that being said, the science is like, important. So I'm curious, what kind of people is NASA looking for?

• 6:52Speaker 01

  So the application asks for people 30 to 55, so we can go, though they said that they'll consider other ages who can pass their physical and psychological tests. They want people with science backgrounds and astronaut-like qualities. So resilient people who can work independently and with a team.

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  When, if somebody's been interested by our conversation about those, when are applications due?

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  NASA's website says the deadline is ongoing.

• 7:18Speaker 02

  OK. Second topic, which was intriguing, sugar in space? What's going on here?

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  So researchers have long wondered how life on Earth started. Like, where did the ingredients come from? And how did they get here?

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  Big questions.

• 7:31Speaker 03

  Some of the biggest. Some scientists have been trying to answer it by scanning our galaxy for the building blocks of life and their precursors. One particularly good place to look is something called the interstellar medium, which is basically the space in between the stars.

• 7:47Speaker 02

  So this might be a dumb question.

• 7:50Speaker 01

  No.

• 7:50Speaker 02

  But are there, are there things in that space? Or I thought it was just--

• 7:54Speaker 01

  A vacuum.

• 7:54Speaker 02

  Space.

• 7:54Speaker 01

  Right, yeah.

• 7:55Speaker 02

  I thought space.

• 7:56Speaker 01

  So in certain areas, there is. So my first research project was on the interstellar medium. Shout out to Kristin Larson, my advisor. It basically consists of all kinds of compounds in the form of dust particles and ices.

• 8:08Speaker 02

  OK.

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  It turns out that this interstellar medium, Scott, is an amazing chemical factory that can produce a range of organic molecules, including ones needed to fashion RNA, proteins, and cell membranes.

• 8:23Speaker 02

  And I assume a kind of sugar, perhaps?

• 8:25Speaker 03

  That's right. A team of scientists pointed two telescopes in Spain at the interstellar medium, that rich chemical brew in the center of our Milky Way galaxy. And they scanned it for radio signals of different molecules, which is how they found a four-carbon sugar called erythrolose.

• 8:42Speaker 01

  I've heard of like, glucose and fructose, but like, how do you say that, Ari?

• 8:47Speaker 03

  Erythrolose.

• 8:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've never heard of that.

• 8:50Speaker 02

  That feels like an Odyssey character.

• 8:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:52Speaker 03

  It's not that common, but it's found in raspberries. Itasco Jimenez Serra, an astrophysicist at the Center for Astrobiology in Spain, says the discovery, which was published in Nature Astronomy, was thrilling.

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  Your heart starts beating super fast, like, you get super excited, very nice feeling.

• 9:12Speaker 02

  Why exactly is she so excited? Why, why is this such a big deal?

• 9:15Speaker 03

  Well, living things make and use sugars, but we don't know how they come about without life around. These results suggest that sugars may have been made inside a molecular cloud before stars or planets formed. They could then be incorporated into, say, an asteroid as it's being built from the material in the interstellar medium. And then such a space rock could have struck the early Earth, perhaps delivering a subset of key ingredients, sweetening the stage for the emergence of life here.

• 9:45Speaker 01

  I saw what he did there.

• 9:48Speaker 02

  And maybe elsewhere?

• 9:50Speaker 03

  Yep, exactly, Scott. I spoke with Angel Moharro, an organic geochemist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, who wasn't involved in the research. And he says this discovery adds to evidence that these ingredients may have given rise to life, not just on Earth.

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  So it's my guess that if we were to find life elsewhere, it's going to be using the same kind of chemistry. There's no reason to think that life is going to be based on something else.

• 10:12Speaker 02

  So let's talk about a spacecraft on an ongoing journey from here to elsewhere. This spacecraft on the edge of our solar system.

• 10:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, so this is the NASA's New Horizons spacecraft. It's famous for taking those first detailed images of Pluto's surface.

• 10:26Speaker 02

  Right, that heart on Pluto. Those pictures were so vivid.

• 10:30Speaker 01

  They were so beautiful, Scott. So since then, New Horizons has continued to travel towards the edges of our solar system.

• 10:37Speaker 03

  Then last year, it went into about 11 months of hibernation. It does this periodically to save energy. And now it's woken up about 6 billion miles away from us and counting.

• 10:48Speaker 02

  Not unlike Ryan Gosling in Project Hail Mary.

• 10:52Speaker 01

  He was even further.

• 10:53Speaker 02

  What is this spacecraft doing?

• 10:56Speaker 03

  It's studying the edges of our solar system.

• 10:58Speaker 01

  So it's in the Kuiper Belt right now. And this is the region where Pluto lives. There's a lot of other icy objects. The end of this belt is basically the end of our solar system. So our solar system is in this bubble that the Sun makes called the heliosphere. And that heliosphere protects the solar system from high-energy radiation coming from other parts of the galaxy.

• 11:18Speaker 03

  Both of the Voyager spacecrafts have traveled out of the solar system, and they studied the edge of that bubble along the way. But scientists still don't know too much about this sphere of protection that the Sun creates. And as New Horizons sails through the limits of our solar system, it might be able to gather more clues on how that bubble works or even what it is.

• 11:40Speaker 02

  We talked earlier about how it can take 20 minutes for a message to go back between Earth and Mars. This is something that is 6 billion miles away. How does this spacecraft communicate with Earth?

• 11:53Speaker 03

  Scientists can talk to spacecraft this far out because of NASA's Deep Space Network. It's this array, Scott, of three radio dishes on Earth, one in California, one in Spain, one in Australia. And these things are giant.

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  The 70-meter antenna would, if you put it in the football stadium, it would take up the whole space.

• 12:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's huge. So that's Alice Bowman, a spacecraft engineer and the mission operations manager for New Horizons. And she was just so excited to be part of this New Horizons mission, which is truly a testament to human ingenuity.

• 12:28Speaker 02

  Much like this recurring segment.

• 12:30Speaker 01

  It's true. It's a testament to human ingenuity. Our ingenuity, we thought it up.

• 12:35Speaker 01

  So Scott, Ari, thank you for spacing out with me. Ari, was it OK?

• 12:41Speaker 03

  It was great. The cat didn't even notice.

• 12:44Speaker 01

  The cat didn't even notice.

• 12:46Speaker 02

  Cats typing an application to be in a simulated Mars mission for a year.

• 12:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, he would go. He's got nothing on his calendar.

• 12:51Speaker 02

  I guess cats would be great.

• 12:53Speaker 01

  They would be amazing.

• 12:54Speaker 02

  Yes, send cats to Mars.

• 12:57Speaker 01

  Well, thank you. Thank you both for being here.

• 12:59Speaker 02

  And you too.

• 13:00Speaker 03

  Thank you for having me.

• 13:04Speaker 01

  If you liked this Spacing Out episode and you have a friend that loves space, too, share it with them. It will help our show. And hey, give us a follow on the NPR app or wherever else you're listening from so you'll never miss a new episode or a new episode of Spacing Out.

• 13:21Speaker 01

  This episode was produced by Berlin McCoy and Megan Lim. It was edited by Christopher Intagliata, Amina Khan, and our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez.

• 13:29Speaker 03

  Tyler Jones checked the facts. Robert Rodriguez and Valentina Rodriguez Sanchez were the audio engineers. I'm Ari Daniel.

• 13:36Speaker 01

  And I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.

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