The prospect of living on other planets, easily achieved in fictional Hollywood productions, isn’t so simple for the scientific community. The amount of research and data it takes to accomplish such a feat is staggering. But NASA is taking baby steps, with the announcement of a 2025 Mars simulation mission. The mission is set to begin on October 19, 2025, at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. For just over one year, Air Force Major Ross Elder will command a team of three other astronauts, all living and working together in an early preview of human habitation on what we call “The Red Planet.”
The mission is dubbed CHAPEA for Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog. It’s expected to give NASA some valuable information on what could occur during real-life scenarios on Mars, and the Moon, as well. What happens when a small crew living in tight quarters experiences everything from faulty devices to sporadic communication, all while dealing with very few resources? Can the team successfully adapt, or will they fall apart at the seams?
Despite the outcome, NASA will use the data when planning an eventual Mars mission, provided it can be saved. The more data NASA can gather now, the better they’ll be, which is why the Human Research Program is spearheading the Mars simulation. Thanks to the program’s work with the International Space Station, NASA already has a better understanding of what space missions can do to the human psyche, as well as the body.
NASA conducted a 45-day Mars simulation with a Human Exploration Research Analog (HERA) crew in the fall of 2024. Four crew members worked in an environment similar to that of Mars, and did everything from gathering data, to tending a garden. But while the HERA program, and NASA itself, is committed to putting humans on Mars, what if life has already come and gone on the red planet?
On September 10, 2025, NASA announced that the Perseverance rover obtained a sample from Mars’ Jezero Crater that could contain signs of life. The evidence in the rock was small, and very old, but it was also promising. That’s due to the rock’s origin, as it came from a location that once held water, making it more capable of proving a biosignature long after the fact. This wasn’t the first time Perseverance collected Mars rocks, and has even used AI to examine them, but this discovery has lead NASA to take a second look at previous samples. If those efforts yield similar findings, it could conclusively prove that Mars was indeed once a consistently habitable planet.
But before making assessments prematurely, NASA can look to existing frameworks like the Confidence of Life Detection (CoLD) scale. CoLD gives NASA an organized and efficient process to evaluate any such findings. Only by following this process and ruling out all other possibilities, can NASA safely say that any evidence found on Mars is actually linked to biological life.