For scientists at the European Space Agency, a mission to Mars means going to Antarctica first.

Three kilometres above sea level, 1000 km inland and -60 °C, Dome C, an ice plateau deep in the Antarctic interior, is one of the most remote and inhospitable places on Earth. Since 2005, it has also been home to the staff of the French-Italian Concordia research station^w1.

This combination of isolation and extreme conditions makes Concordia an interesting place for the European Space Agency (ESA; see box): it’s about as close to a space mission as you can get without leaving Earth. So while Concordia’s scientists study astrophysics, glaciology, seismology and the hole in the ozone layer, an ESA-sponsored researcher lives among them, observing the station’s crew for clues about how a long space mission might affect the physical and mental health of astronauts.

“If you look at the expected characteristics of a future mission to Mars, for example,” says Oliver Angerer, ESA’s co-ordinator for research at Concordia station, “those scenarios typically also have a very small crew size, even smaller than the crew of Concordia: most scenarios have four to six crew members.

ESA’s interest in this kind of scenario also underpinned the recent Mars500 experiment^w2, in which volunteers were sealed in a spaceship simulator for 520 days, the expected duration of a round trip to the red planet. In some ways, such as the very close confinement and the selection of the crew, the Mars500 simulation was more similar to a space mission than the Concordia scenario. The crew of Mars500, however, were exposed to no real dangers and were carrying out a scientific programme well beyond what would ever be reasonable in a space mission.

In those respects, Concordia provides a more realistic analogue of space travel. “When researching space travel, we need both simulations and analogues; they are complementary, as their advantages and disadvantages essentially mirror each other,” explains Oliver.

The small group that lives at Concordia over the Antarctic winter is a little bigger than the crew of a space mission, but the pressure on their mental and physical health is similarly intense. For this reason, nobody lives on the base permanently – the staff members are exchanged every summer.

Sitting down together to share meals also helps, Oliver says, particularly in the three months in the middle of winter when the Sun does not rise above the horizon. “It’s something that gives a bit of a structure,” he says, “especially because there is no obvious day or night.” Shared meals aren’t always possible, though – life at Concordia is busy. A lot of the research there is astronomy, and the astronomers are often on a different schedule to the rest of the crew.

There are some surprisingly simple things that can be done about it though. One of the experiments at Concordia, for example, involved subtly changing the colours of the lights inside the station’s buildings. “Tests have shown that we don’t only have rods [the cells that detect light and dark] and cones [which give us colour vision] in our eyes as light receptors; there is also a third receptor that is especially sensitive to blue light,”^w4 Oliver explains. “And that is not only used for vision, if at all, but also more directly linked to the sensors in the brain that control our circadian rhythm.”^w5

It turns out that standard indoor lighting, even though it looks white to us, is missing a lot of the blue part of the spectrum that our brains expect during daylight hours, so our bodies don’t perceive the subtle clues that keep our body clock ticking normally. The solution? Install bluer lighting in the working areas of the station, and redder (less blue) lights in the sleeping quarters. Result? A better night’s sleep.

“If you’re there, you really get the impression that you are as close to being on a different planet as you could be while staying on Earth,” says Oliver. With the last flight of the Antarctic summer having left, Alexander Kumar will be finding out just how true that is.