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A serious case of cabin fever just ended for a group of NASA astronauts. The team spent a year inside a small white dome, pretending to live on Mars and only venturing out occasionally in spacesuits. On Sunday they finally stumbled out into the Hawaiian sun.
The simulated trip was called HI-SEAS IV, short for Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation. An analog is a living space made to copy what it would be like to live on another planet, and a simulation is a practice run of how something will happen in the future. It was the second-longest simulated trip of its kind. It was designed to help NASA researchers study the challenges that might occur during a real Mars mission.
The journey to Mars takes about six months each way. As a result, astronauts will have to live on Mars for nearly two years while they wait for the planets to realign for their trip home. The longest human spaceflights so far have been stays on the International Space Station or the Soviet space station Mir. NASA has a lot of things to figure out before its astronauts can stay on the Red Planet.
