Mission to Mars: 6 to spend a year in isolation

Six smiling people entered a dome on a barren Hawaiian volcano on Friday afternoon, and it remains to be seen whether they'll still be smiling after a year of isolation to simulate life on Mars, reports Mashable.

The HI-SEAS IV is the longest mission yet to simulate long-duration space exploration. University of Hawaii Manoa researchers will be monitoring the group's cohesion in the NASA-funded study.

Each crew member will get a little sleeping cot and desk, and dine on delicacies such as powdered cheese and canned tuna.

A mission to Mars could take up to three years, and researchers want to find out the best way to compose a team that can handle the stress.

"The longer each mission becomes, the better we can understand the risks of space travel," said Kim Binsted, HI-SEAS principal investigator and UH Manoa professor.

Luckily for those of us who don't fancy a year of complete isolation from the human race, we can follow their progress on social media. Here are the tweeters among the group:

Sheyna Gifford, health science officer and journalist Andrzej Stewart, engineering officer Cyprien Verseux, astrobiologist. The other crew members are soil scientist Carmel Johnston, architect Tristan Bassingthwaighte and physicist Christiane Heinicke.