Nathan Jones, MD, a physician at Springfield (Ill.) Memorial's Emergency Department, will soon join NASA as a medical officer for a year-long, ground-based mission exploring survival on Mars.
The mission, titled Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog, will aim to understand intricacies behind challenges that could arise on a human mission to Mars. Participants will join NASA for the year-long research and live in a 3D-printed, 1,700-square-foot simulation of Mars' surface.
"The simulation will allow us to collect cognitive and physical performance data to give us more insight into the potential impacts of long-duration missions to Mars on crew health and performance," Grace Douglas, a principal investigator for the mission. "Ultimately, this information will help NASA make informed decisions to design and plan for a successful human mission to Mars."
Dr. Jones will be expected to respond to challenges the crew could face with his expertise along with the added barriers of equipment failures, communication delays and other challenges NASA may simulate for the study.
"They're gonna stress us out with different things that might go wrong and see how we react to it, how we fix the problem," Dr. Jones said in an interview with ABC affiliate, WICS. "They're taking people who they believe are similar to their actual astronauts and they're asking them to go on a mission as similar as possible to an actual mission to see how they respond to the conditions."
Four crew members, including Dr. Jones, and two back up crew members were selected for the research after a 2021 call for participants, according to NASA. He will head to Houston in May ahead of the mission's launch in June, WICS reported.