The meanings of Hypatia
Hypatia Project
Hypatia is a project to inspire next generations, with an emphasis on young girls —and other underrepresented groups— interested in pursuing STEM-related careers.
Hypatia I Mission
Hypatia I is a crew composed of nine women, with different ages and backgrounds, that will travel in April 2023 to the analog Mars station in the desert of Utah, in the United States. For two weeks, the crew will conduct high-quality space-related research and rigorously simulate their day-to-day life on Mars, confined in a small space and deprived of small luxuries of life on Earth, like a daily shower.
Mars Desert Research Station
Analogous stations are centers located in remote and extreme places on Earth that allow to simulate life on other planets, such as Mars. This allows testing of new space technologies and analyzing the behavior of a crew in isolated conditions.
The Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS) is a Mars analogous station operated by the Mars Society, an international non-profit organization dedicated to promoting research and exploration on the red planet, located in the desert of Utah, in the United States.
The facilities of the MDRS, connected by tunnels to ease the mobility of the crew, are:
- Habitat (Hab): two-floor, eight-meter-diameter building where the crew lives and plans the extra vehicular activities (EVA).
- Astronomical Observatories: two infrastructures, one dedicated to the observation of the Sun and the other to the study of the night sky.
- GreenHab: a greenhouse that allows agricultural research and plant cultivation for human consumption.
- Geology and Microbiology Lab: scientific dome of seven meters in diameter for research.
- RAAM: Repair and maintainence module.
Mars Exploration
Mars has always aroused fascination among humans. This planet is the fourth closest to the Sun and is located in the habitable zone of our Solar System. Precisely, current space missions are looking for clues to life in the past and determine its habitable potential. Currently, there are eleven international missions on Mars which are still operational. Three of them were launched in 2020: NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance, China’s Tianwen-1 and Hope, the first UAE mission sent to Mars.
