Year-long 'Mars isolation' begins

Six people shut themselves inside a dome for a year in Hawaii on Friday, in the longest US isolation experiment aimed at helping Nasa prepare for a pioneering journey to Mars.

The crew includes a French astrobiologist, a German physicist and four Americans -- a pilot, an architect, a doctor/journalist and a soil scientist.

They are based on a barren, northern slope of Mauna Loa, living inside a dome that is 36 feet in diameter and 20 feet tall.

In a place with no animals and little vegetation around, they closed themselves in at 3:00 pm Hawaii time Saturday, marking the official start to the 12-month mission.

The men and women have their own small rooms, with space for a sleeping cot and desk, and will spend their days eating food like powdered cheese and canned tuna, only going outside if dressed in a spacesuit, and having limited access to the Internet.

Any astronauts that go to Mars are facing a trip that would last far longer than the six months that humans typically spend at the orbiting International Space Station.

Nasa's current technology can send a robotic mission to the Red Planet in eight months, and the space agency estimates that a human mission would take between one and three years.

So what kind of person wants to spend a year this way? Crew member Sheyna Gifford described the team as "six people who want to change the world by making it possible for people to leave it at will," she wrote on her blog, LivefromMars.life.

Architect Tristan Bassingthwaighte said he will be "studying architectural methods for creating a more habitable environment and increasing our capability to live in the extreme environments of Earth and other worlds," according to his LinkedIn page.