“I’m really looking forward to it, but I’m also realistic,” Kelly Haston told AFP. “It’s a huge challenge.”
At the end of June, Kelly Haston will be one of the four volunteers stepping into a Martian habitat in Houston, Texas that will be their home for the next 12 months. “Living on Mars wasn’t exactly a childhood dream for Canadian biologist Kelly Haston, though she’ll soon spend a year preparing for just that,” the 52-year-old told AFP, summing up her participation in an exercise simulating a long stay on the Red Planet.
For NASA, which interviewed and tested the candidates carefully before selecting them, these long-duration experiments allow the evaluation of a crew’s behavior in an isolated environment – before a real mission takes off.
The space agency has warned: participants will face hardware failures, water restrictions and other “surprises”. Their communications with the outside will suffer from the existing delay between Earth and Mars, i.e. up to twenty minutes (40 minutes round trip).
“I’m really looking forward to it, but I’m also realistic,” Kelly Haston told AFP. “It’s a huge challenge.”
Who is Kelly Haston?
Haston, a registered member of the Mohawk Nation of the Six Nations of the Grand River in Canada, is a research scientist with experience building models of human disease.
She has spearheaded innovative stem cell-based projects deriving multiple cell types for work in infertility, liver disease, and neurodegeneration.
Haston earned a Bachelor of Arts in integrative biology and a Master of Arts in endocrinology from the University of California, Berkeley, and a doctorate in biomedical sciences from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), and Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, where she combined animal and cell-based approaches to discover biological defects associated with infertility.
Haston’s postdoctoral work at both Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and UCSF’s Gladstone Institutes focused on amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.