This past summer, Professor Jason Lee of the University of Connecticut’s Mechanical Engineering Department traded in his usual lab clothes for a spacesuit, spending 45 days in NASA’s Human Exploration Research Analog (HERA) Mars habitat in Houston, Texas.
“I left for training before the spring semester was done,” said Lee. “Part of my brain was still thinking about work.”
As a member of the four-person crew on the mock starship Polaris, Lee did not arrive at the Johnson Space Center as a researcher, but as the subject of experiment.
“We have two weeks of training, and the whole point of it was to run experiments and look at how isolation effects how procedures are done, how teamwork is done,” noted Lee.
In preparation for the May 10 launch of HERA’s Campaign 7 Mission 2, the Polaris crew was held to a meticulously plotted daily schedule. “Every single person had a specific task,” said Lee. “Alright, eight o’clock, I gotta take my temperature. Oh, nine o’clock we have to take a shower. Like, it was that regimented during training, and even way more during the actual mission.”
Polaris’s simulated voyage included all the elements of a true mission to Mars and back, featuring supply limitations, communication time delay – up to 20 minutes both ways at its peak, and a fully realistic timeline of trip duration.
“At 7 a.m. they would play music. We gave them a playlist. So, every morning, one of our songs would play, turn on the lights, they would talk in the comms, ‘Good morning Polaris, this is MCC Mission Control,’” detailed Lee.
Each day’s tasks were preceded and followed by a series of physical assessments, carefully measuring and maintaining the health of the team, who were required to exercise six days a week.
“We’re always wearing Garmin watches and active watches to measure heart rate. We had Dexcom for glucose measurements,” said Lee. “From time to time, we hook up electrodes to our bodies or to our heads, depending on what tasks we’re doing.”
The greatest concern to NASA researchers, according to Lee, was the capacity for crewmates to work together despite diverse backgrounds and disciplines. Alongside the UConn professor, crew members included Piyumi Wijesekara, a NASA researcher studying the effect of inhaled moon dust on the lungs, airline pilot Shareef Al Romaithi of the United Arab Emirates’ MBRSC space program, and Stephanie Navarro, a space operations officer for the U.S. Air Force with a background in physics.
From working, exercising and eating together to partnering up for virtual reality space walks on the Martian surface, Lee emphasized the critical importance of teamwork.
“What I most brought back is that teaming effect. I try to bring that back to what we work with our students on,” said Lee. “Always the issue is how team students do or don’t work well with each other.”
Looking back on the experience, Lee’s excitement at fulfilling, in some capacity, his life-long dream of space travel shone through.
“As, like, the space nerd and kid, in my head, I feel very lucky … They let us use some of the things that are in the very early stages that they might use, so we have AR glasses, VR glasses,” said Lee, whose tone pitched up when reflecting on Canadarm, the outer-space robotic hand he was trained to operate. With cutting-edge technologies at his fingertips, Lee noted feeling like a character in a world of near-cinematic science fiction.
Back ‘on the ground’, Lee has returned to his professional duties as the Undergraduate Director of UConn’s School of Mechanical, Aerospace, and Manufacturing Engineering, as well as being UConn’s NASA Connecticut Space Grant Consortium Campus director (CTSGC).
Spearheaded by the University of Hartford, the CTSGC hosts a variety of internships, scholarships and grant opportunities for all space-travel related endeavors. All those interested in pursuing a career in the aeronautics and space industries are encouraged by Lee to apply for the spring 2025 call for proposals at ctspacegrant.org.