Mission Success! | NASA's Human Exploration Research Analog (HERA) | JSC

Mission Success! | NASA's Human Exploration Research Analog (HERA) | JSC

Mission success! 🚀🌎 

NASA's Johnson Space Center: "Our all-women HERA crew has now completed their 45-day simulated space mission to the Mars moon, Phobos. Their work helps NASA study how isolation & confinement affects crew behavior, health, & performance—all without leaving Earth."

Congratulations to Vanesa Gomez Gonzalez, Sandra Herrmann, Kimberly Knish, and Katie Koube! 

HERA Crew biographies: http://bit.ly/42enJ3S

What better way to celebrate Women's History Month?

Housed at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, HERA enables researchers to study how crew members adjust to isolation, confinement, and remote conditions on Earth before NASA sends astronauts on deep-space missions. To help researchers learn about crew behaviors, the crew carries out various science and maintenance tasks inside HERA, such as analyzing rock samples in a glovebox and testing augmented reality capabilities. Crew members also faced the challenge of increasing communication delays with mission control as they approach Phobos. During this mission simulation, communication delays will last up to ten minutes (five minutes each way).

Insights from how crews perform these tasks and adapt to communication delays will help NASA develop strategies that enable crew members to become more autonomous, work better as a team, and communicate effectively to accomplish mission tasks. Using this data, researchers aim to optimize methods for Artemis missions to the Moon, as well as future journeys to Mars and beyond.

NASA's Human Research Program pursues methods and technologies to support safe, productive human space travel. Through science conducted in laboratories, ground-based analogs, and the International Space Station, this team scrutinizes how spaceflight affects human bodies and behaviors. Such research drives NASA's quest to innovate ways that keep astronauts healthy and mission-ready as space travel expands to the Moon, Mars, and beyond. 

Learn more about how NASA innovates for the benefit of humanity at:

https://www.nasa.gov/hrp

Credit: NASA's Johnson Space Center (JSC)

Release Date: March 14, 2023

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