![]() The red planet has large, gently sloping shield volcanoes with exposed lava flows that are geologic cousins to Mauna Loa. The site was chosen based on its relative remoteness and its similarities to terrain on Mars. The habitat’s location on an active volcano and geologically young lava flows was intentional. “Now we’re hoping that neither the Saddle Road nor the Mauna Loa Observatory access road get cut off by lava flows,” Binstead said. The photo above, taken by a drone operated by biologist Jordan Lerma, shows the habitat with the fissure 3 lava flow and a plume of volcanic emissions in the background on December 3, 2022. ![]() “The flow from fissure 4 looked threatening initially, but it has stalled out for now, and it looks like the flow from fissure 3 has settled into its path about half a mile to the west of the hab,” said former HI-SEAS principal investigator Kim Binstead. The most recent mission concluded in May 2022. Though the station’s dome-shaped habitat wasn’t occupied when Mauna Loa erupted, multiple crews have lived and worked in it for missions lasting up to a year to help mission planners understand what astronauts exploring the surface of Mars or the Moon and living for long periods in cramped quarters would need to thrive. During the first few days of the eruption, fissure 4 was on a path that posed a potential threat to a small analog space research station that is part of the NASA-funded Hawai’i Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS) project. That flow is about two kilometers west of fissure 3. More subtle but also visible in the Landsat image are warm areas associated with cooling lava from fissure 4. A cloud of volcanic gas is visible wafting around the fissure. The image is overlaid with infrared data from OLI-2 showing the location of warm areas associated with lava. At the time, lava from fissure 3 was moving north toward Saddle Road, a key artery that connects the eastern and western sides of the island and provides access to the slope of Mauna Loa and Mauna Loa Observatory. On December 2, 2022, the Operational Land Imager-2 (OLI-2) on Landsat 9 acquired this natural-color image of the erupting volcano. One of these- fissure 3-quickly became dominant, producing a long lava flow that spanned more than 10 kilometers (6 miles) after just a few days. But by the next morning, activity had migrated to a cluster of four fissures northeast of the summit. When Hawaii’s massive Mauna Loa volcano began erupting for the first time in nearly four decades late on November 27, 2022, lava initially spilled from the Moku’āweoweo crater at the mountain’s summit.
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