TUCSON, Ariz. — Before you go to the Moon or Mars, people making the voyage need to be prepared.
That's why a four-member crew was sealed inside a vessel called SAM. It stands for Space Analog for the Moon and Mars. They went in last Thursday and came out Tuesday.
For six days the four crew members ate, slept, and worked inside an 11,000-square-foot vessel called SAM.
The crew emerged from the air-tight pressurized habitat and were greeted by former biospherean Linda Leigh.
She spent two years inside Biosphere 2 with seven other crew members over 30 years ago.
Cassandra Klos is the mission commander and photographer she commented, "It's been very heartwarming for all of us to meet the biospherans and that we have their support."
Each member was tasked with a different job.
Sheri Wells-Jensen was the mission communications and accessibility officer. "My job on this crew was to look at accessibility not just from a blindness perspectives but from other perspectives of different people in different bodies."
Dr. Iman Jahangir the mission medical officer is a cardiologist, and a two time NASA astronaut candidate finalist.
"What I was looking for was methods of stress mitigation so we had various that we did to try mitigate stress and record some physiological measurements to see if any of those were affected."
Bailey Burns was the mission engineer who was concerned about many things including.
"The toilet works we had no issues. Thank you Kai for making sure that one worked. That was a good lesson learned everything went as planned."
Kai Staats the director of research for SAM said all the research will be documented for other scientists who will be heading to the Moon or Mars and credited the original biospherians.
"They laid the foundation they had the vision and here we are 30 years later carrying forward some of their ideas into a new way of using this facility."
There's another mission on the horizon. On May 10, another crew will be also be calling SAM home for six days.
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