Could you survive on Mars for 500 days? If you had to live on Mars while you waited for the planets to line up for the flight home, where would your air, water, food and power come from? We follow one imagined long stay, using what real missions have already measured.
0:00 500 days until the flight home
1:10 How do you breathe?
2:38 Where is the water?
4:07 What will you eat?
5:33 What does the weather do?
7:27 What happens when Earth goes quiet?
8:58 Can you go home yet?
What this film does and does not claim: the stay is hypothetical; nobody has lived on Mars. The 500-day surface stay comes from one NASA long-stay reference concept (Design Reference Architecture 5.0, 2009), which is not an approved mission plan. The day counter is illustrative and sped up. MOXIE made 122 grams of oxygen in 16 runs (2021-2023); it demonstrated oxygen extraction on Mars, not a complete crew-scale oxygen production and storage system. Ice mapped from orbit is not yet a water supply. In the greenhouse crop study, tomatoes grown with peas and carrots roughly doubled their yield, but the peas and carrots did worse and the mix had no overall yield advantage. During solar conjunction NASA pauses commands to its Mars robots for about two weeks; it is not always total silence. CHAPEA Mission 2's exit on 31 Oct 2026 is NASA's schedule as of 25 Oct 2026.
Sources
- NASA, "NASA's Simulated Mars Crew Marks One Year Inside Habitat" (Oct 2026) and CHAPEA mission pages; CHAPEA Mission 1 (July 2024)
- NASA/JPL, "NASA's Oxygen-Generating Experiment MOXIE Completes Mars Mission" (6 Sep 2023); Mars 2020 landing press kit
- NASA/JPL Phoenix releases (19 Jun 2008; Aug 2008); Hecht et al., Science 325:64 (2009)
- Dundas et al., "Exposed subsurface ice sheets in the Martian mid-latitudes", Science 359:199 (2018); PIA22077
- NASA/JPL, "NASA's Treasure Map for Water Ice on Mars" (Dec 2019)
- NASA, ISS water recovery milestone (June 2023); NASA Veggie, Expedition 44 lettuce (10 Aug 2015)
- Gonçalves et al., PLOS ONE (2024), doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0302149
- NASA/JPL Opportunity mission end (13 Feb 2019); NASA InSight power update (May 2022) and mission end (21 Dec 2022)
- NASA Mars Design Reference Architecture 5.0, NASA-SP-2009-566
- NASA/JPL, Mars solar conjunction (Nov 2023)
Visuals: NASA/JPL-Caltech and partners (credited on screen), NASA JSC (CHAPEA, ISS). Thumbnail: illustration, not a real photo. Music and sound effects are original. Data cards and the day counter are original graphics.
Narration is a synthetic voice. Independent production, not affiliated with or endorsed by NASA.
After five hundred days, what would wear you down first: keeping the machines running, living with the same small crew, or being so far from everyone else? Tell us in the comments.
