As NASA studies how to achieve President Barack Obama’s call for a manned mission to Mars by the 2030s, Hawaii has a couple of significant pieces of the action.

The space agency recently allocated $1.2 million more for a Mauna Loa-based study of the foods astronauts might eat on a long mission to Mars.

Six researchers are living at the 8,000-foot level, working, suiting up and eating like astronauts at a simulated Martian base. The new funds will pay for three more “missions” of four months, eight months and a year.

Next summer, exercises at high altitudes over Kauai will test giant parachutes and inflatable devices that will be needed to land crews, vehicles, housing and equipment weighing up to 40 tons in the thin Martian atmosphere.

Hawaii is a natural for these activities. Our active volcanoes provide geological features close to what voyaging astronauts will find, and our geographic isolation allows atmospheric tests that endanger no populations.

NASA has been taking advantage of unique Hawaii assets going back to the U.S. program to land a man on the moon.

In 1965, four years before the first moon landing, Apollo astronauts came to Hawaii for five days of geological training on Mauna Loa. Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, Alan Bean, David Scott, Richard Gordon, Don Eisele and Roger Chaffee all signed the guest book at the Mauna Loa Observatory.

My first big assignment as a young Hono­lulu Star-Bulletin reporter was to help cover a visit by Apollo 12 astronauts Charles “Pete” Conrad and Bean to Mauna Loa and Kilauea in August 1969, a month after the first moon landing on Apollo 11 by Neil Armstrong and Aldrin.

Conrad and Bean spent one day studying geological formations on Mauna Loa similar to what they would see on the moon and a second day on Kilauea practicing with the tools they would use to gather rock specimens.

“The Hawaiian Islands offered an incomparable display of recent basaltic volcanic features,” said the late Elbert A. King, curator of lunar samples and a geology professor at the University of Houston. “Both rough and smooth surfaces of lava flows could be compared to the moon’s surface.”

My role was to provide photographic support for veteran Star-Bulletin reporter Lyle Nelson, which was a challenge because all I had was a boxy Rolleiflex with no telephoto lens, and we weren’t allowed near the astronauts.

I got some decent shots with a little ingenuity, such as placing my camera on the ground behind some baseball-size rocks so it looked like the astronauts off in the distance were negotiating a field of giant boulders.

When Apollo 12 launched on Nov. 14, 1969, I likedfeeling a personal connection to the mission, and it’s good that Hawaii will get to experience a similar connection to the Martian missions.

———
Reach David Shapiro at volcanicash@gmail.com or blog.volcanicash.net.