ED3R5A Space Studio, the University of Ladakh, IIT Bombay

• The Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Council will support the initiative.
• Aim: To simulate interplanetary habitat conditions on Earth to explore the feasibility of establishing a sustainable base station beyond Earth. 
• Importance:
  • Location:The geography of Ladakh with its extreme isolation, dry climate, and barren, high-altitude terrain  provide an ideal simulating conditions similar to Mars and the Moon.
  • Future Missions: The mission will help in gathering critical data that will support India’s Gaganyaan program and future missions.

About Analog Space Mission

• These are field tests conducted in remote Earth environments to simulate extreme space conditions, allowing researchers to study human and robotic response to space-like challenges.
• Need: These missions are important for evaluating technologies, habitats, communication systems, and other equipment necessary for extraterrestrial operations.
  • Human Behaviour Insights: These missions also study the behavioral dynamics of humans under isolation, confinement, and team-driven settings, conditions essential for deep-space missions.

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• Advantages:

• • Resource Constraints of Space: There is not enough time, money, equipment, and manpower to conduct all the experiments in space.
  • Safety Check: Countermeasures can be tested in analogs before trying them in space. 
  • Speed and Efficiency: Ground-based analog studies are completed more quickly and less expensively.

• Current Analog Missions:

• • Desert Research and Technology Studies (Desert RATS): Testing Pressurised Rovers D-RATS will practise operations for future missions beyond Artemis III
  • Envihab: It is a research facility operated by the Institute for Aerospace Medicine at the German Space Agency used to study how continuous and intermittent centrifugation (or spinning) could help counter the physiological effects of microgravity.
  • HERA in Houston, Texas is a unique 650-square-foot habitat designed to serve as an analog for isolation, confinement, and remote conditions in exploration scenarios.

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