Houston, we have a podcast. Welcome to the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center, episode 423, Chippia 2, Audio Log 2.

I'm Kenna Pell and I'll be your host today. On this podcast, we bring in the experts, scientists, engineers, and astronauts all to let you know what's going on in the world of human spaceflight, and more.

We're back with another audio log from the Chippia crew.

Chippia, or crew health and performance exploration analog,

is a year-long analog mission in a habitat right here on Earth

that's simulating very closely what it would be like to live on Mars.

We're lucky enough to have check-ins with the crew,

Commander Ross Elder, flight engineer James Spicer,

medical officer Ellen Ellis, and science officer Matthew Montgomery. This is the second analog mission for Chippea. This isn't

so much a technology demonstration or a dress rehearsal for a human Mars mission. The primary

purpose of this study is human research, a deep study into understanding what life would be like

if you were living on the red planet for a full year. Now, as much as we'd like to have live

interviews with the crew, they are simulating what it would be like to be on Mars. So video interviews,

phone conversations, or really any form of communicating with Earth will be significantly

delayed. Any information sent at the speed of light could take somewhere on the order of three to 23 minutes,

and that's one way, depending on relative distance between Earth and Mars as they orbit the sun.

This makes a two-way conversation very, very difficult.

So to meet the needs of this analog, the crew is recording an audio log based on the questions

that we have drafted for them.

And on today's episode, we'll play recordings from February 2026, just over four months into the

experiment, which is here at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, and just past their one-third mark of the mission.

We'll also be bringing on two special guests, Patrick E. Step, technical discipline lead for the

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