Whitefish woman returns from simulated space mission

For an entire year, Carmel Johnston and five crewmates survived the desolation that is Mars.

If they left their dome-shaped habitat, it was in a spacesuit designed to survive the harsh Martian conditions. Contact with Earth was minimal, and the 20-minute email delay between one planet and the other dragged down response time significantly.

But when the year was up Aug. 28, those six explorers exited their dome without spacesuits, welcomed by media and fellow scientists at Mauna Loa, one of the five volcanoes that form Hawaii.

Johnston, a Whitefish native, was crew commander on the fourth mission for the Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS), a year-long Mars simulation operated by the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

Six people lived for 365 days in the small, dome-shaped habitat perched on the rocky volcanic landscape to study different aspects of living in a Mars-like environment. The program has been partially funded by NASA since its first year in 2013.

After earning a bachelor’s and master’s from Montana State University, Johnston worked in Alaska, New Zealand and Glacier National Park before joining HI-SEAS to study food production in an environment like Mars. She went through psychological tests, research applications and personality tests before joining the crew. The final exam was taking a camping trip in Idaho with her future crewmates, where she met Tristan Bassingthwaighte from Missoula.

Bassingthwaighte took a break from working on a doctorate degree in architecture to join HI-SEAS. While everyone else conducted dense scientific research, Bassingthwaighte said his role could be described as “social lubricant officer.”

“My big thing was just that I’m a goofball who likes to tell jokes and make light of things and have fun,” he said.

Daily life in the dome rarely changed. The crew would wake up and check emails to plan the day’s work, then watch TV while they ate their breakfast. Johnston would conduct her research tasks, spend two hours a day exercising and make her dinner as the day came to a close. She also spent time writing about her experience in her blog, snowballschanceonmars.wordpress.com.

Each crew member had their own research projects, and free time was filled by learning new skills to stay busy. Johnston learned to salsa dance, and she even competed in the Missoula Marathon in July 2015 from her treadmill in the habitat. Other crew members learned ukulele or practiced languages they’d never had time to learn.

“You don’t really have much time to think of having cabin fever because you have so much stuff to do,” Johnston said. “You’re only there for a year, so you have to fit three years worth of ambition into one year. We’re all a bunch of overachievers anyway, so of course we gave ourselves too many projects to work on.”

Now the crew returns to normal life. Bassingthwaighte has one year left of school, and the future is wide open for Johnston, though she did make a point of wanting to take Bassingthwaighte hiking and teach him to shoot a gun. Coming out of the dome and back into society has been a bit overwhelming, Bassingthwaighte said.

“You’re changing pace so much that you don’t really fit anymore,” he said. “I went from this rigid, controlled environment and now there’s traffic and restaurants. It’s kind of surprising how chaotic normal life is, and nobody really realizes that until they have a super rigid lifestyle for a year.”

It was an enjoyable experience for everyone involved, Johnston said. However, she’s not quite ready to encourage just anyone to sign up for a trip to Mars.

“I think it takes a special kind of person to deal with the isolation and the disconnect from Earth,” she said.