01 · What counts

What makes an analog astronaut mission

The term covers both a year-long sealed NASA habitat and a themed weekend in the desert. That gap is a research problem. Missions that run differently cannot be pooled, so results cannot be compared. IGSA-STD-1, released in 2023 by analog mission managers and habitat directors, exists to close it.

An analog is a place on Earth that resembles a target environment. An analog mission is what happens when people live there as though it were that environment. Conditions 1 to 3 set the minimum. Conditions 4 and 5 separate a mission from a site.

The consequence. A rover trial in the Atacama, an instrument calibration on a Turkish salt flat and a suited traverse across a Canadian impact crater are all analog research. This atlas maps them, then scores them honestly, so they score near zero on isolation and duration. A place can be an excellent Mars analog and a poor analog mission. The index says so instead of averaging the difference away.

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