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If you fancy getting away from it all, then NASA might have something for you. They are recruiting four people to spend a year living “on Mars”.

The space agency says that the volunteers, who must be non-smoking US citizens or permanent residents, will be confined to “Mars Dune Alpha”. This is a 157 square metre habitat at its Johnson Space Center in Houston that includes four private crew quarters, common lounge areas and food-growing stations.

The crew will have to perform spacewalks, “habitat maintenance” and robotic operations. But it won’t all be plain sailing as the habitat simulates the challenges of a mission on Mars, including resource limitations, equipment failures, communication delays, and “other environmental stressors”.

If that still takes your fancy, applications close on 2 April with the assignment starting in early 2025. This is the second of three such missions – the first began in June 2023 with four crew and passed the half-way mark in January. The efforts will help to develop systems and methods for the first generation of astronauts that visit actual Mars, which is currently slated for the 2030s.

Digital highway

Still on space, Bridgit Mendler, who rose to fame with her role on Disney Channel’s “Good Luck Charlie”, has announced a new space initiative. She has teamed up with her husband Griffin Cleverly and Engineer Shaurya Luthra to launch a space communications start-up, Northwood Space, which received a cool $6m in funding this week.

The firm, which was founded in October 2023 and is based in El Segundo, California, is aiming to build “a data highway between Earth and space”. This will be done by mass producing ground stations that connect to satellites in space.

“Space is getting easier along so many different dimensions but still the actual exercise of sending data to and from space is difficult,” she told CNBC. “You have difficulty finding an access point for contacting your satellite.” Northwood is aiming to carry out a first test connecting to a spacecraft later this year.

And finally, wrapping up our space-themed Red Folder, researchers at the University of Bristol in the UK have created a new computer model that is able to mimic Moon dust so well that it could help to design better lunar robots as well as to train astronauts ahead of lunar missions.

“Think of it like a realistic video game set on the Moon – we want to make sure the virtual version of moon dust behaves just like the actual thing, so that if we are using it to control a robot on the Moon, then it will behave as we expect,” says Bristol’s Joe Louca.

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• Source: https://physicsworld.com/a/live-on-mars-for-a-year-disney-stars-space-adventure-lunar-dust-computer-model/