A group of “analog astronauts” will spend four weeks on a simulated version of Mars to prepare for the challenging environment on the Red Planet.- Advertisement –

The mission, hosted by the Israel Space Agency, will take place in the Negev desert, and will be managed by ‘Mission Control’ at the Austrian Space Forum with a 10-minute delay to simulate the time difference between Mars and Earth.

They will be placed in a habitat similar to the design astronauts will use on future missions to Mars. Geologically, the composition of the Negev Desert is very similar to that of Mars, making it an ideal setting for testing practices, the researchers say.

“This is our first mission where our analog astronauts will live and work completely independent in their habitat for three weeks. A small on-site support team is available for technical problems and maintenance,” said Dr. Gernot Grömer, director of the Austrian Space Forum. but will not be allowed to interact with analog astronauts.

The simulation, known as AMADEE-20, will see five men and one woman wearing “detailed space suit prototypes” as they step outside or drive the rover.

Mission is ‘first test for planetary defence’, says space agency

Nasa has announced plans to send a spacecraft hurtling into an asteroid at 15,000mph to change its path in the US space agency’s first “planetary defence” test. 

The mission, known as a Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), will be the Nasa’s “first use of the kinetic impactor technique” in which “a large, high-speed spacecraft is sent into an asteroid’s path to change its motion”, reported CBS News.

Nasa has called the mission “the first test for planetary defence”, and will send the spacecraft on a collision course “to hit the binary near-Earth asteroid Didymos and its moonlet, Dimorphos” on 24 November. 

The mission will “assess if it is possible to divert an incoming celestial body”, The Telegraph said, in the hope that we can “avoid a mass extinction event like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs, and most life on Earth, 66 million years ago”. 

Scientists have already identified at least 26,000 “near-Earth objects”, 4,700 of which meet Nasa’s classification as “potentially hazardous objects”. These are objects in space that are “larger than 500ft across, pass within 4.7 million miles of the planet, and would cause devastating damage if they hit” the Earth, the paper added. 

The Didymos system, the target for the DART demonstration, is made up of two bodies. Didymos, the primary body, is roughly 780 metres across according to Nasa, while its moonlet is about 160 metres in diameter. The space agency hopes to hit the moonlet, which is “more typical of the size of asteroids that could pose the most likely significant threat to Earth”.