According to NASA’s chief scientist for the ISS Program, the space agency is getting ready for Mars by bolstering the role of the International Space Station. In particular, NASA plans to use the ISS as a ‘Mars transit analog’ to get ready for the Artemis program, which includes crewed missions to Mars in the 2030s





‘We really could do much more,’ Julie Robinson, NASA's chief scientist for the ISS Program, said last weekend at the first Space Health Innovation Conference . ‘We're ready to do more, because we have 20 years of really good datasets.’





The Case for Use-Cases on the ISS

ISS research has led to many advances in understanding of physiological effects of space missions, but is not suitable when it comes to some long spaceflight issues such as significant communications delay or lengthy isolation. Robinson and her multi-disciplinary team recently assessed ways in which the ISS operations and facilities can be modified to serve as an analog for missions of longer duration that will travel beyond low-Earth orbit. One of the use-cases identified is conducting more one-year-long missions to the space station.





Currently, astronauts go to the ISS for stints of about six months. However, a trip to Mars would take 16-18 months just for the travel time alone. NASA scientists have decided that before crews go to Mars, the agency needs more data about how long-duration spaceflight affects astronauts, both physically and mentally.





Needed: 10 More Subjects for 300+ Days in Space

So far, only one American astronaut, Scott Kelly, has gone on a year-long ISS mission. Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Korniyenko was also part of the mission, spending almost a year in space. For two other astronauts, Peggy Whitson and Cristina Koch, NASA extended their stays on the space station. Whitson stayed afloat for 289 days, and Koch will spend 11 months on the ISS, returning in February 2020.





Robinson voiced concerns that three data points simply aren’t enough. ‘What we're saying now is we want to really bump that up a notch and add 10 more subjects to that US database,’ she said, adding that the plan has been approved as soon as NASA starts sending astronauts via a shuttle from American soil.





For now, NASA continues to depend on the Russian Soyuz vehicle to shuttle astronauts to and from the ISS, as the two capsules in development, SpaceX’s Crew Dragon and Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner, are still undergoing testing, and will not fly crews until 2020 at the earliest.





Robinson said that the US agency wants to have control of the crew schedule, which is why the capsule completion is essential to planning the ISS Program. She added that NASA is working with Roscosmos to see if Russian cosmonauts will also participate in this research.





The Case for the Physical and Mental Well-Being

There is a second use case, and it is also dependant upon the readiness of the commercial shuttle. NASA wants to know about the condition in which astronauts will arrive on Mars after the long journey, and whether they will be able to perform certain tasks. Considering that astronauts returning from the ISS are affected physiologically, this is a serious issue.





Logistical concerns follow the health issues: if recovery time after landing on Mars equates to a week, then much more battery power would have to be built into the Martian lander. Which would make it twice as heavy, Robinson warned.





Last June, NASA conducted a 10-hour test of sensory and motor skills of the ISS crew members who just landed. The agency would like to do the same with crews that will come off of the Starliner, as it touches down on land, unlike the Crew Dragon, which splashes down in the ocean.





‘Landings in the water are really no good as a Mars analog, because you take something that was already pretty bad and you make it horribly worse by bouncing around in the ocean,’ Robinson said, adding that the third crewed Starliner landing is currently planned for 2022, which means that testing could possibly be conducted then by the ISS Program.





More Experiments to Come

Traveling to Mars will vary significantly from the ISS missions. There will be no resupply missions, real-time communications with ground control and more. The astronauts who travel to the red planet one day will have to rely on themselves and what’s available to them on their vehicle.





Which means more logistical problems: how to handle serious medical issues, and how to deal with the Mars-mission-like communications delay. To tackle the first issue, NASA plans to conduct a medical simulation on the ISS in spring 2020. As for the second issue, Robinson said that the current plan is to hold a two-week experiment of communications delays, and possibly extend the periods for longer for the experiments thereafter.





Some use cases are impossible to test, Robinson said. For example, restricting the space available to each crew member to 25 cubic meters — what is expected on the Mars-bound vehicle — is not feasible, as moving equipment around on the ISS is too much of a hassle. That said, future experiments looking at space restriction could be performed on commercial modules that dock with the ISS, or on the free-flying space stations. For example, such an experiment may be held on the Lunar-Orbital Gateway, which NASA plans to begin building in 2022.

There is much to be done in terms of gathering data to be better prepared for trips to Mars. With these modifications and the subsequent experiments, and NASA’s ambitious goals of building a sustainable presence on and around the moon by 2028, it seems that the US space agency is on the right path.







