Simulated Mars Mission Ends

This is cool. I wonder how stir crazy they got, being stuck in their habitat unless outside in a n EVA suit.

The simulation is an experiment in planetary exploration and its demands. The team was looking at what happens to a crew in a remote, harsh, close-quartered environment under simulated Martian conditions (crews would only go outside the habitat during a fully simulated EVA) when they are working on real science.

"The work that this crew has done will contribute to studies of Mars and to studies of the response of permafrost on Earth to global warming," said the mission’s remote science principal investigator Chris McKay, of NASA Ames. "Their pioneering simulation of crew operations on Mars time is by far the best work on this topic ever done. It sets the standard for future Mars mission simulations."

Next to studying global warming, the coolest thing the crew did was take advantage of the 24 hours of summer sunlight in the Arctic to shift all their operations to Martian Time (a day on Mars is 24 hours and 39 minutes). The crew would simply cover the hab windows from 8pm to 8am "local" Mars time every night.