The world's largest volcano Mauna Loa in Big Island, Hawaii. Photo / Getty Images
Six people have shut themselves inside a dome in Hawaii for a year, 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 11m across and 6m tall.
The men and women have their own small rooms, with space for a cot and desk, and will spend their days eating foods like powdered cheese and canned tuna, only going outside if dressed in a spacesuit, and having limited access to the internet.
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.
