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Life on Mars: Carmel Johnston

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Event Status

‘You can fake your personality for a couple of weeks, at most … But over the long term, your true personality will come out.’

Carmel Johnston, an environmental scientist, was the crew commander of NASA’s most recent Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS) project. As part of this mission, she spent an entire year living with five other scientists in an 11-metre-wide geodesic dome on the Mars-like slopes of Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii.

The focus of the study, which concluded in August last year, was psychological. NASA wanted to learn individual stress reactions and group cohesion in an intensely cramped, isolated environment comparable to life in a space vessel on Mars. The researchers had to wear full space suits any time they left the dome, and resources were painstakingly rationed and recycled.

In conversation with astronomer Alan Duffy, Johnston will discuss group dynamics, freeze-dried scrambled eggs and social survival in a space dome.

Presented in partnership with WOMADelaide’s Planet Talks Programme.

This event will be Auslan interpreted.

Featuring

Carmel Johnston

Carmel Johnston recently finished serving as Commander of the Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation, where she and five other people lived in complete isolation for an entire year. With a Masters of Science in Land Resources and Environmental Sciences from Montana State University, she was ... Read more

Alan Duffy

Associate Professor Duffy is an astrophysicist at Swinburne University creating baby universes on supercomputers to understand how galaxies like our Milky Way form and grow within vast halos of invisible dark matter. He is attempting to find this dark matter as part of SABRE, the world’s first da... Read more

Location

The Wheeler Centre

176 Little Lonsdale Street Melbourne Victoria 3000

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The Wheeler Centre acknowledges the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation as the Traditional Owners of the land on which the Centre stands. We acknowledge and pay our respects to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and their Elders, past and present, as the custodians of the world’s oldest continuous living culture.