Canadian Biologist Kelly Haston Will Spend a Year on Mars

WASHINGTON: Kelly Haston will be one of four volunteers entering a Martian habitat in Houston, Texas, at the end of June. This habitat will serve as their home for the upcoming 12 months. "Living on Mars wasn't exactly a childhood dream for Canadian biologist Kelly Haston, though she'll soon spend a year preparing for just that," the 52-year-old said in reference to her involvement in a simulation of a protracted stay on the Red Planet.

These long-duration studies enable NASA, which thoroughly evaluated candidates through interviews and testing before choosing them, to assess a crew's behaviour in a remote setting before an actual mission launches.

Hardware problems, water limits, and other "surprises" are what the space agency has advised participants to expect. Due to the current delay between Earth and Mars, which is up to twenty minutes (40 minutes round trip), their communications with the outside world may suffer.

"I'm really looking forward to it, but I'm also realistic," Kelly Haston told to the media. "It's a huge challenge."

Haston is a research scientist with experience creating disease-related model organisms. He is a registered Mohawk Nation of the Six Nations of the Grand River resident in Canada.

She has led cutting-edge stem cell-based programmes that produce several cell types for use in research on infertility, liver illness, and neurodegeneration.

Haston graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a Bachelor of Arts in integrative biology and a Master of Arts in endocrinology. She then went on to Stanford University and the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) for her doctorate in biomedical sciences. At these universities in Palo Alto, California, she combined animal and cell-based methods to identify biological flaws linked to infertility.

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis was the focus of Haston's postdoctoral studies at the Gladstone Institutes at UCSF and Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Four crew members will enter a 1,700 square foot (158 square metre) habitat in June to begin the first mission, which would imitate a voyage to the surface of Mars by having them live there for a full year. Through NASA's call for applications in 2021, the participants were chosen.

Research scientist Kelly Haston, who specialises in human disease, is in charge of the mission. Ross Brockwell, a structural engineer who works as a flight engineer, Nathan Jones, an emergency medicine doctor, and Alyssa Shannon, an advanced practise nurse, are also on board. Trevor Clark, an aerospace and defence engineer, and Anca Selariu, a microbiologist in the United States Navy, are serving as backup crew.

The four crew members of the next CHAPEA (Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analogue) project will reside in the Mars Dune Alpha habitat, a 3D-printed structure at NASA's Johnson Space Centre in Houston, for the duration of the voyage.

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