Meet Kelly Haston, Canadian Biologist To Participate In NASA's Mars Mission

Kelly Haston, a Canada-based biologist, will spend 12 months in a Martian habitat in Houston, Texas, starting at the end of June. She is one of the four volunteers who have been selected for the project. The 52-year-old shared with the Agence France Presse (AFP) that living on Mars wasn’t exactly a childhood dream, but she’ll soon be spending a year preparing for that.

NASA interviewed and tested candidates before selecting them for the long-duration experiments that will allow them to experiment on the crew’s behaviour in an isolated environment before setting off on a real mission.

The participants were warned by the space agency that they might face hardware failures, water restrictions, and other "surprises." They also added that there will be a communication delay of 20 minutes (40 minutes round trip) with the outside world. Kelly Haston shared that it was a huge challenge and that she was looking forward to it but was also realistic.

Kelly Haston Mars Mission

Kelly Haston is a registered member of the Mohawk Nation, one of the six nations of the Grand River in Canada. She’s a scientist experienced in building models of human disease.

Haston has led innovative stem-cell-based projects deriving multiple cell types for work in neuro degradation, infertility, and liver disease.

She holds a bachelor of arts in integrative biology and a master's degree in endocrinology from the University of California, Berkeley. She also earned a PhD in biomedical sciences from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). At Standford University in Palo Alto, California, she combined animal and cell-based approaches to discover biological defects associated with infertility.

Haston has worked at UCSF’s Gladstone Institutes and Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, focusing on amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

The mission is set to launch at the end of June. Four volunteers will enter a 1,700-square-foot habitat and live there for a whole year. The 3D-printed habitat is located at NASA's Johnson Space Centre in Houston and is called Mars Dune Alpha. NASA called for applicants in 2021 to select the participants.

Kelly Haston will be leading the machine as the commander. She’ll be joined by flight engineer Ross Brockwell, emergency medicine physician Nathan Jones, and Alyssa Shannon, an advanced practice nurse.

The backup crew members will consist of aerospace and defence engineer Trevor Clark and Anca Selariu, a US Navy microbiologist.

The habitat will include private crew quarters, a living area, a kitchen, two bathrooms, and work areas. In addition, there is a 1,200-square-foot Mars mural and a red sand environment outside. The crew members will conduct stimulating spacewalks with the aid of virtual reality. The crew members will wear their suits while doing their "spacewalk."

They will participate in the usual activities that astronauts would do on Mars, from cooking to cleaning to exercising, apart from maintenance work on the habitat, crop growth, and scientific research.

NASA said in a statement that this will allow them to collect cognitive and physical performance data, which will provide them with insight into the potential impacts of long-duration missions to Mars. This information would ultimately assist them in designing and planning a successful human mission to Mars.

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