Astronauts readying for the Artemis 2 round-the-moon mission in 2026, and prepping for future lunar landings, are starting to make visits to a remote northern crater in Canada. Led by Western University's Gordon Osinski, a planetary geologist, they are not only digging for moon-like features, but also learning how to work in difficult conditions.

Black bears are known to roam the area surrounding Kamestastin (Mistastin) Crater, a meteorite impact zone in northern Labrador, although "Oz" — as the community knows Osinski — says luckily none have visited his camp recently. The team comes prepared with noisemakers and firearms just in case.

Artemis 2 astronauts Jeremy Hansen (of the Canadian Space Agency, or CSA) and Christina Koch (with NASA) were among the group that climbed into Zodiac boats to do geology on the prominent central island within Kamestastin's area in 2023. Oz had only gone there once, briefly, by helicopter, so the group scouted a beach, landed and began to look around.

Then they spotted it — rock melts from the ancient impact, which had never before been spotted in previous geology excursions. "It was astounding," Oz recalled, especially because in front of him he could see training he had provided take hold: "It was cool seeing the astronauts, like Jeremy, recognize that this was an unusual and different rock, based on the previous places we'd taken them."

Teams from NASA, CSA and similar groups will now visit this site at least every two years as a capstone to Artemis geology training. And in terms of science return, Oz's team has produced several papers on the rock melts, and expect to do more — a recent example just went up at Earth and Planetary Science Letters.

The finding is a powerful example of not only serendipity, but how expeditions to remote environments help astronauts prepare for the real thing. An igneous rock called anorthosite, found at Kamestastin, is also expected to be at the lunar south pole — where the Artemis 3 astronauts will land later in the decade. And Oz will be on the front lines: he will co-lead the Artemis 3 science team, becoming the first Canadian to do so for a NASA moon landing.

So the remoteness of Kamestastin makes the crater a perfect analog for the large team waiting to explore the secrets of the lunar surface. But how do we make sure the astronauts will psychologically function in such a remote spot?

Anyone who has been stuck in a waiting room, inside a vehicle during a long drive, or who remembers the difficulties of leaving home during the pandemic understands a bit about isolated, confined environments (ICE). Submarines, living in Antarctica and space missions are just some examples of professional environments where ICE is a requirement of the job.

"In a remote environment, because you go with a very few people, you don't have access to everything as close to you as you would in a city," Caroline-Emmanuelle Morisset, a senior scientist in lunar and planetary science with CSA, told Supercluster. "The setting of it, the fact that it's remote, helps as well to mimic what you would do in a space mission."

But there's a rub. Humans are highly adaptable creatures, notes a 2021 peer-reviewed study of ICE literature by Lawrence A. Palinkas and Peter Suedfeld, two noted scholars of the field. Researchers nevertheless began to notice "psychosocial issues" in the 1960s and early 1970s in environments such as polar expeditions, early spaceflights, and training environments designed to simulate space missions.

Any evidence of "individual and interpersonal problems" is — as the study says — anecdotal and sometimes misconstrued. Peer-reviewed research it cites nevertheless notes issues during long-duration Russian/Soviet missions, as well as the NASA-Russian shuttle-Mir space program of the 1990s. (Some popular histories of spaceflight say there was a "mutiny" aboard NASA's Skylab space station in the 1970s, but the astronauts denied it and NASA called it an "urban legend" — you can read more about why here.)

Still, even an outsider to spaceflight can appreciate the difference between committing to a mission for a couple of weeks — the typical spaceflight length during say, the shuttle program — and embarking on a space station mission that could last six months or more. Then throw in some international crew dynamics, the fact you can't really go outside, and the ups and downs of normal life — as astronauts have missed family births and deaths while in space for a long time, and even witnessed large-scale events like 9/11 from orbit. It's therefore understandable why even a professional trained for decades would appreciate training on how to deal with isolation.

NASA's astronaut crew office has been seriously studying this matter since the International Space Station era. (Agency officials were not available for an interview during the writing of this article, due to the 43-day U.S. government shutdown.) In the 2021 book "Psychology and Human Performance in Space Programs", edited by Lauren Blackwell Landon, Kelley J. Slack and Eduardo Salas, the office is quoted as saying spacefarers need at least five skills to do well during a long-duration mission: communication, self-care, team care, teamwork/group living and knowing when to execute leadership or "followership" (meaning, when individuals work to support the group and the leader).

Lots of time working far from the comforts of home. NASA starts its astronaut candidates early, as part of their basic training; a 2022 release from the U.S. military describes an exercise where "ascans" simulated a crash-landing in the wilderness and lived for several days on site, gathering food, water and other resources they needed.

"You're recreating this kind of environment where you count on the people you're working with, and you don't have resources outside of that team, basically," Morisset said. "You get to know, really, your team — the team that you're working with."

In a sense, that training is always ongoing — sitting with crewmates in a simulator for hours, or working in spacesuited pairs in the famed Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory pool for spacewalk preparation, are minor examples of ICE. But prior to spaceflight, astronauts have also been asked to work extremely remotely for a few weeks — such as in Sardinian caves with the European Space Agency, or in the underwater Aquarius laboratory owned by Florida International University.

Kamestastin is very much in the same training scheme as these remote locations, which also teaches the astronauts how to do their work — gathering science — in isolated teams. "The whole idea behind training them in science is really training them to get to know one another, and to rely on one another, as they will do something similar in space," Morisset said.

By virtue of all this time in ICE, when astronauts climb into Twin Otter planes for their flights to Kamestastin, they already have weeks — maybe even months — of remote time before touching down in northern Labrador. It's a beautiful environment in the pictures, but rugged. The Innu Guardians accompanying these excursions have talked about the perpetual northwestern and western winds blowing across their lands. Freezing-cold water and lots of rain put participants at risk of hypothermia, Osinski notes.

And unless someone gets severely injured, the Twin Otter will only come back when the expedition is finished — and even at that, the military flight will only bring you back as far as Resolute Bay, at latitude 74 degrees — the same latitude of the seas of Greenland or Norway. Even by Canadian standards, that's super far north. This story is being filed from Ottawa; our government says my city is the snowiest national capital of the world, but our Parliament is nevertheless perched at a relatively balmy 45 degrees latitude.

Oz was a new professor at Western University when Hansen, along with the CSA's David Saint-Jacques, were selected as astronaut candidates in May 2009 after a nationwide search that produced 5,000 applicants for just two positions. Two decades ago, NASA's focus was on safely closing out the space shuttle program and ramping up ISS expeditions. But NASA, Oz said, also wanted to include more geology training in the astronaut candidate training.

While geology was always included to some extent in NASA training, space aficionados usually closely associate geology with Apollo. The moon-landing astronauts of Apollos 16 and 17 (at the least) even trained briefly at another Canadian crater site in Sudbury, Ontario, notes Don E. Wilhelms' "To a Rocky Moon: A Geologist's History of Lunar Exploration." These excursions, only a couple of days each, left an impression; the transcript for Apollo 16 includes a moment when commander John Young spotted a familiar-looking sedimentary rock on the moon: "It looks like a Sudbury breccia," he said.

CSA (and other agencies) train their astronauts alongside NASA, so that gave Oz an entry with the renewed geology focus. He first spoke with CSA officials to see if there was any interest to expand Saint-Jacques' and Hansen's geology training. There was. In fact, Hansen made his first excursion with Oz in 2011 shortly before Hansen was fully certified as an astronaut, which bore big science fruit: the team found several unexpected rock types while exploring Saskatchewan's Gow Lake impact structure. (Results were published in 2023, a dozen years later, in part because Oz had more pressing science to put into publication first.)

The work with Hansen and Saint-Jacques so impressed CSA and NASA that when the next round of Canadian astronaut candidates was chosen in 2017, NASA invited Oz to do geology training for all the candidates in that class — American and Canadian. The person who coordinated the invitation, who is NASA geochemist Cynthia Evans, ended up having an Artemis connection too: she is now training and strategic integration lead for the Artemis internal science team.

While Artemis was not quite in the conversation a decade ago, Oz's involvement was evidently impressive. He was invited to provide geology training to subsequent astronaut candidates in every NASA selection, which happens roughly every two years. His pan-Canadian crater work has included several visits to Kamestastin, periodically, since 2009. So by the time the last Trump administration refocused NASA exploration on moon efforts, Oz was in the right spot to help – and Canadian and US astronauts alike are now visiting Kamestastin, most recently this year.

The CSA is excited to see how Oz will continue to iterate the training, which like all things at NASA requires careful pre-certification of activities against a checklist of skills the astronauts will require in space. "There's that knowledge that it will evolve, but it is clear that Kamestastin is going to remain a site where the astronauts are going to train, and then there might be slight changes to be more similar to the mission eventually," Morisset said.

Oz demurred when talking about this achievement, saying he was lucky that his experience in terrestrial craters and field work played into what NASA needs. But he did say he is happy to act as a bridge between teams at the agency. Oz is one of the few people within the Artemis team who is both a trainer, and a member of the geology team.

"I think it's worked out to be very important to make sure nothing falls between the cracks," Oz said. "The geology team is understanding what training the astronauts will eventually get, which is hugely beneficial."

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Elizabeth Howell is a Canadian space journalist based in Ottawa.