Four volunteers have completed 378 days inside a NASA habitat designed to simulate a Mars mission, emerging on Oct. 31 after a year without windows, outdoor sounds, or real-time calls with family and friends. A NASA report by Sumer Loggins describes the agency’s second CHAPEA mission, an Earth-based study of the challenges of living and working in isolation.
Ross Elder, Ellen Ellis, James Spicer, and Matthew Montgomery entered the roughly 1,700-square-foot, 3D-printed Mars Dune Alpha habitat at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston on Oct. 19, 2025. During the simulation, they took part in mock Marswalks, robotic operations, habitat maintenance, exercise, and crop cultivation. Researchers and ground teams supported the crew as they collected health and performance data while managing limited resources and communication delays of up to 22 minutes each way.
The mission offers researchers a way to examine how people and teams handle some constraints anticipated in distant space exploration. The crew’s experiences also highlighted practical demands: Elder said that preparing suits, following airlock procedures, and making long simulated traverses took time and stamina. He emphasized nutrition, exercise, and rest as important to sustaining that schedule. These observations describe the crew’s experience in a simulation; they are not results from a Mars expedition.
The crew also had to manage the details of daily life. Ellis, the mission’s medical officer, helped organize biological sample collections and prepare supplies for health research. She highlighted the coordination needed between a future crew and its ground team. Spicer described tracking consumables ranging from dish soap to respirator filters, while carefully managing food and water. Montgomery helped identify rock samples collected during simulated walks and set up the habitat’s 3D-printing capabilities. He also worked on a seed-germination experiment using a control and simulated Martian soil.
NASA’s account reports the data collection and the crew’s reflections, rather than presenting analyzed study results. Two weeks of post-mission evaluations and debriefs are expected to help researchers interpret the data alongside the crew’s experiences. The study builds on CHAPEA’s first mission, which ended in July 2024.
Grace Douglas, CHAPEA’s principal investigator, said the research will help NASA weigh health and performance risks against resources such as crew time, communication capacity, and food and water system designs. That tradeoff matters because a mission’s plans must account for both the demands placed on people and the resources available to support them. NASA project scientist Sara Whiting said the data comes as the agency plans how astronauts will live and work at a future lunar outpost near the Moon’s South Pole. The account also notes that some resource challenges for space explorers resemble problems on Earth.