HI-SEAS crew enters habitat, Mission VI commences

VIDEO NEWS RELEASE

HI-SEAS VI crew Calum Hervieu, Lisa Stojanovski, Michaela Musilova and Sukjin Han

Link to video and sound (details below):  http://bit.ly/2o9Yqh9

WHAT:  Start of the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa’s Hawaiʻi Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS) Mission VI

WHEN:  5:32 p.m. HST, February 15, 2018

WHERE:  A geodesic dome habitat atop Mauna Loa on the island of Hawai‘i

WHO: Four astronaut-like Mission VI crewmembers hail from Australia, Korea, Scotland and Slovakia.

Sukjin Han is an assistant professor in economics at University of Texas at Austin.

Calum Hervieu is an astrophysicist and systems engineer from rural Scotland.

Michaela Musilova is an astrobiologist and the chair of the Slovak Organisation for Space Activities.

Lisa Stojanovski is a professional science communicator, and host of the YouTube show TMRO.

Kim Binsted, HI-SEAS principal investigator, is a UH Mānoa professor of information and computer sciences

WHY: An eight-month research study of human behavior and performance. The NASA-funded project aims to help determine the individual and team requirements for long-duration space exploration missions, including travel to Mars.

HOW:  The crew will perform exploration tasks such as geological fieldwork and life systems management. The mission is conducted under isolated and confined  conditions designed to be similar to those of a planetary surface exploration mission.

OTHER FACTS:

• All communications are delayed by 20 minutes in each direction to simulate the time it takes a message to travel between Earth and Mars.

• Daily routines include food preparation from only shelf-stable ingredients, exercise, research and field work aligned with NASA’s planetary exploration expectations.

• The primary behavioral research includes a shared social behavioral task for team building, continuous monitoring of face-to-face interactions with sociometric badges, a virtual reality team-based collaborative exercise to predict individual and team behavioral health and performance and multiple stress and cognitive countermeasure and monitoring studies.      

• HI-SEAS Mission VI continues a series of successful 8-month and 12-month missions that place HI-SEAS in the company of a small group of analogs capable of operating very long duration missions in isolated and confined environments such as Mars500, Concordia and the International Space Station.

• Link to the  HI-SEAS Mission VI media kit:  http://hi-seas.org/?p=4353

VIDEO (Can only be viewed using editing software/Please credit University of Hawai‘i)

B-ROLL:

0:00-0:16, 3 shots: exterior shots of the habitat

0:16-0:51, 3 shots: crew preparing to enter habitat

0:51-1:42: crew entering habitat

SOUND:

Kim Binsted, HI-SEAS principal investigator, UH Mānoa professor  (8 seconds)

“This is the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa’s project.  So NASA funds the University of Hawai‘i to run the HI-SEAS project and has done so for six missions now.”

Kim Binsted, HI-SEAS principal investigator, UH Mānoa professor (10 seconds)

“If we are going to go to Mars or other destination in the solar system, we have to make sure that we are prepared.  That we have the right people and the right equipment and we put them together in a way that’s going to get people there and back again safely.”

Sukjin Han, HI-SEAS Mission VI Commander (13 seconds)

“I thought that it will be an interesting experience for myself, on top of  the fact that Iʻll be contributing even though it’s a small contribution to human space exploration.”

Lisa Stojanovski, HI-SEAS Mission VI Communications Specialist (8 seconds)

“I’ve always wanted to go to space and Iʻve always wanted to be an astronaut.  I felt like the HI-SEAS project was like a stepping stone on the way for me to become a real astronaut.”

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