Want to spend a year living in NASA's Mars simulation?

ANNOUNCER: You're listening to Short Wave from NPR.

REGINA BARBER: Hey, Short Wavers. Regina Barber here. And you know what time it is. It's time for us to talk space news. For a whole episode, it's Spacing out with Gina. Here today is my co-host, my fellow co-creator and space cadet from All Things Considered, Scott Detrow.

SCOTT DETROW: So excited to be back. Favorite time of the month. Let's space out.

BARBER: Yeah, yeah. OK. And joining us, Scott, is a newcomer, NPR's science correspondent, Ari Daniel. Welcome, Ari.

ARI DANIEL: Thank you.

BARBER: And to start, did you know that in space, no one can hear you scream?

DANIEL: But here on Earth, in the room next door, my cat can.

[LAUGHTER]

DETROW: Ari, welcome to "Spacing Out."

DANIEL: Oh, I'm so glad to be here.

BARBER: It's gonna be great. I promise, Ari. OK. We're gonna talk about NASA's recruitment of volunteers to simulate a year-long mission to the moon and then Mars. I have a question for both of you, though. Would either of you do this simulation, like a year-long simulation?

DETROW: I think I would hold out for actually going to Mars if I was going to.

BARBER: Would you really want to go? Oh my gosh, not me.

DETROW: I mean, I would be more interested in that than pretending to go to Mars in Texas.

BARBER: Fair, fair. What about you, Ari? Would you simulate going to the moon, then Mars?

DANIEL: I don't think you could get me to do it either. I just feel like to clear the calendar for that long of a time to go to Houston, you know? I mean, I'd be happy to go to Houston for, like, a weekend, but--

BARBER: Right. Not a year, though.

DANIEL: --a year--

BARBER: In a room.

DANIEL: --in a-- in an enclosure might be a hard sell.

BARBER: So I would miss my family too much. And honestly, like, even being with them for a few days and, like, not going to work and not leaving the house turn me into a monster. So I am not the person to recruit for these missions.

DETROW: Yeah. I guess I will say, there's blips of time where I'm like, this would seem appealing, to just kind of hide for a year. But yeah, I think it would get old quickly.

BARBER: Yeah. I'm not-- I don't think I would be a team person after-- after a week.

DANIEL: Well, does sugar help, Gina? Because I'm--

BARBER: Yes.

DANIEL: --bringing you and Scott a story about sugar molecules found in space. How about that for a segue?

BARBER: You did amazing, Ari.

DETROW: Wow.

BARBER: I loved it. I appreciate it. OK. And we'll end this spacing out party with a story about a spacecraft that just woke up on the edge of our solar system.

DANIEL: Rise and shine.

BARBER: So today on the show, we got isolation, sugar, and the edge of our solar system, real heady stuff.

DETROW: This is existential.

BARBER: Yeah. You're listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.

[FUTURISTIC MUSIC]

BARBER: OK, Scott, Ari. Should we start with human isolation?

[LAUGHTER]

DETROW: I mean, no bigger question, but-- but what I'm wondering is, if these astronauts are not actually astronauts because they're not going to Mars, what exactly is it that NASA is focusing on here?

DANIEL: Well, right now, people can apply to join a year-long, four-person simulated mission to the moon and Mars. It'll take place at the Johnson Space Center in Houston and could start as soon as August of next year.

DETROW: These people are, of course, not actually going to the moon or Mars, though.

BARBER: No.

DETROW: So what is it that they're doing when they don't leave Houston?

BARBER: Yeah. So they spend most of their time isolated in a 650-ish square foot enclosure. And they're simulating travel through deep space. And for two months in the middle, they'll move to a different, slightly bigger structure to simulate surface living on Mars.

DANIEL: And this structure will have areas for sleeping, recreation, work, medical and food areas, plus an airlock and a place to grow crops. They'll do science experiments and test out protocols for living and working in deep space. But there's one big difference from actually being in space. They'll still be living under Earth's gravity.

DETROW: And that's one of the things that scientists wonder about longterm, long-distance space travel, is how being in zero gravity or low gravity that long affects your body. Since that can't be tested out, what exactly is it that NASA is hoping to learn here?

BARBER: Yeah. So one of the big objectives is to understand how the crew deals with stress and isolation. Will they all get along? And how will they handle such longterm separation from their loved ones? One thing they'll test is how the crew deals with communication delays. Because depending on where Mars is in the orbit, it could take a "hello" 20 minutes to get to Earth and 20 minutes to hear back, which also means no instant communication with mission control.

DANIEL: In current and past real-life missions, astronauts have been able to talk to loved ones or mission control in real time. But a Mars mission could last two to three years. So they'll be dealing with these communication delays for a while.

DETROW: I think it's fair to say it takes a special kind of person to volunteer for a not-real space mission for a year. And I'm just imagining the conversations with your spouse or kids, like, hey, I'm going to Mars. And by Mars, I mean this fake Mars.

BARBER: This room.

DANIEL: I mean Houston.

DETROW: This room. So I mean-- but, like-- but that being said, the science is, like, important. So I'm curious, what kind of people is NASA looking for?

BARBER: So the application asks for people 30 to 55-- so we could go. Though, they said that they'll consider other ages who can pass their physical and psychological tests. They want people with science backgrounds and astronaut-like qualities, so resilient people who can work independently and with a team.

DETROW: When-- if somebody's been interested by our conversation about this, when are applications due?

DANIEL: NASA's website says the deadline is ongoing.

DETROW: OK. Second topic, which was intriguing, sugar in space-- what's going on here?

BARBER: So researchers have long wondered how life on Earth started. Like, where did the ingredients come from, and how did they get here?

DETROW: Big questions.

DANIEL: Some of the biggest. Some scientists have been trying to answer it by scanning our galaxy for the building blocks of life and their precursors. One particularly good place to look is something called the interstellar medium, which is basically the space in between the stars.

DETROW: So this might be a dumb question.

BARBER: [LAUGHS] No.

DETROW: But are there things in that space? Or I thought it was just--

BARBER: A vacuum--

DETROW: --space.

BARBER: --right? Yeah.

DETROW: I thought space.

BARBER: So in certain areas, there is. So my first research project was on the interstellar medium. Shout-out to [? Kristen ?] [? Larson, ?] my advisor. It basically consists of compounds in the form of dust particles and ices.

DETROW: OK.

DANIEL: It turns out that this interstellar medium, Scott, is an amazing chemical factory that can produce a range of organic molecules, including ones needed to fashion RNA, proteins, and cell membranes.

DETROW: And, I assume, a kind of sugar, perhaps?

DANIEL: That's right. A team of scientists pointed two telescopes in Spain at the interstellar medium, that rich chemical brew in the center of our Milky Way Galaxy. And they scanned it for radio signals of different molecules, which is how they found a four-carbon sugar called erythrulose.

BARBER: I've heard of, like, glucose and fructose. But like, how do you say that, Ari?

DANIEL: Erythrulose.

BARBER: "Eri-thru-lose?" Yeah. I don't-- I've never heard of that.

DETROW: That feels like an Odyssey character.

DANIEL: It's not that common, but it's found in raspberries. Izaskun Jiménez-Serra, an astrophysicist at the Center for Astrobiology in Spain, says the discovery, which was published in Nature Astronomy, was thrilling.

[AUDIO PLAYBACK]

IZASKUN JIMÉNEZ-SERRA: Your heart starts beating, like, super fast, like, [PANTING]. You get, like, super excited, very nice feeling.

[END PLAYBACK]

DETROW: Why exactly is she so excited, though? Why is this such a big deal?

DANIEL: Well, living things make and use sugars, but we don't know how they come about without life around. These suggest that sugars may have been made inside a molecular cloud before stars or planets formed. They could then be incorporated into, say, an asteroid as it's being built from the material in the interstellar medium. And then such a space rock could have struck the early Earth, perhaps delivering a subset of key ingredients, sweetening the stage for the emergence of life here.

DETROW: And--

BARBER: I saw what he did there.

DETROW: And-- and maybe elsewhere?

DANIEL: Yeah. Exactly, Scott. I spoke with Angel Mojarro, an organic geochemist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, who wasn't involved in the research. And he says this discovery adds to evidence that these ingredients may have given rise to life not just on Earth.

[AUDIO PLAYBACK]

ANGEL MOJARRO: So it's my guess that if we were to find life elsewhere, it's going to be using the same kind of chemistry. There's no reason to think that life is gonna be based on something else.

[END PLAYBACK]

DETROW: So let's talk about a spacecraft on an ongoing journey from here to elsewhere, this spacecraft on the edge of our solar system.

BARBER: Yeah. So this is the NASA's New Horizons spacecraft. It's famous for taking those first detailed images of Pluto's surface.

DETROW: Right, that heart on Pluto. Those pictures were so vivid.

BARBER: They were so beautiful, Scott. So since then, New Horizons has continued to travel towards the edges of our solar system.

DANIEL: Then last year, it went into about 11 months of hibernation. It does this periodically to save energy. And now it's woken up about 6 billion miles away from us and counting.

DETROW: Not unlike Ryan Gosling in Project Hail Mary.

BARBER: He was even further.

DETROW: What-- what is the spacecraft doing?

DANIEL: It's studying the edges of our solar system.

BARBER: So it's in the Kuiper Belt right now. And this is the region where Pluto lives. There's a lot of other icy objects. The end of this belt is basically the end of our solar system. So our solar system is in this bubble that the sun makes called the heliosphere. And that heliosphere protects the solar system from high-energy radiation coming from other parts of the galaxy.

DANIEL: Both of the Voyager spacecrafts have traveled out of the solar system, and they studied the edge of that bubble along the way. But scientists still don't know too much about this sphere of protection that the sun creates. And as New Horizons sails through the limits of our solar system, it might be able to gather more clues on how that bubble works or even what it is.

DETROW: We talked earlier about how it can take 20 minutes for a message to go back between Earth and Mars. This is something that is 6 billion miles away. How-- how does this spacecraft communicate with Earth?

DANIEL: Scientists can talk to spacecraft this far out because of NASA's Deep Space network. it's this array, Scott, of three radio dishes on Earth-- one in California, one in Spain, one in Australia. And these things are giant.

[AUDIO PLAYBACK]

ALICE BOWMAN: The 70-meter antenna would-- if you put it in the football stadium, it would take up the whole space.

[END PLAYBACK]

BARBER: Yeah. It's huge. So that's Alice Bowman, a spacecraft engineer and the mission operations manager for New Horizons. And she was just so excited to be part of this New Horizons mission, which is truly a testament to human ingenuity.

DETROW: Much like this recurring segment, I think.

BARBER: It's true. It's a testament to human ingenuity--

DETROW: Absolutely.

BARBER: --our ingenuity. We thought it up. So, Scott. Ari, thank you for spacing out with me. Ari, was it OK?

DANIEL: It was great. The cat didn't even notice.

BARBER: The cat didn't even notice.

DETROW: The cat's typing an application to be in a simulated Mars mission for a year--

DANIEL: Yeah. He would go.

DETROW: --to know what's going on.

DANIEL: He's got nothing on his calendar.

DETROW: I guess cats would be great at just, like--

BARBER: They would be amazing--

DETROW: Yeah. Send cats to Mars.

BARBER: --at doing nothing. [LAUGHS] Well, thank you. Thank you both for being here.

DETROW: Anytime.

DANIEL: Thank you for having me.

[RELAXING MUSIC]

BARBER: If you liked this "Spacing Out" episode and you have a friend that loves space too, share it with them. It will help our show. And hey, give us a follow on the NPR app or wherever else you're listening from so you'll never miss a new episode or a new episode of "Spacing Out." This episode was produced by Berla McCoy and Megan Lim. It was edited by Christopher Intagliata, Amina Khan, and our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez.

DANIEL: Tyler Jones checked the facts. Robert Rodriguez and Valentina Rodriguez Sanchez were the audio engineers. I'm Ari Daniel.

BARBER: And I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.

[RELAXING MUSIC]

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