PU Students Return from Mars, Moon Habitats
Hernandez's (left) space dreams are inspired by his dad
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As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowTwo Purdue University graduate students recently returned to planet Earth after missions in “outer space”—one to the moon and the other to Mars. Officially, they didn’t need spacecraft to reach their destinations: the “moon” is a barren volcano in Hawaii, and “Mars” is a Utah desert. But even more fascinating than their space simulations is their journeys to get there; one is the son of a migrant farm worker turned astronaut, and the other lived in a country with no space program, so he set his eyes on Purdue.
A family legacy of space exploration
The 2009 night launch is burned into Julio Hernández’s memory; it was just a few minutes after watching his dad being sent into space on Discovery that Hernández decided he too wanted to become an astronaut.
“It just hadn’t hit me until after I saw the flames from the booster rocket slowly fade into the sky—almost as if they were little twinkles of starlight,” says Hernández, who was 14 years old at the time. “Living in Houston, I had friends whose parents were astronauts, so I didn’t really think it was that big of a deal, because I knew other astronauts there. It wasn’t until I got out of that bubble that I realized the real significance of his accomplishment.”
His father is Mexican and built his dream from humble beginnings as a migrant farm worker.
“[My father] literally went from picking the fields to touching the stars; it was a really big deal,” says Hernández, a doctoral candidate at Purdue’s School of Aeronautics and Astronautics. “He didn’t learn English until he was a teenager; he’d follow the farm seasons up and down from Mexico to California picking crops, not even having one school that he’d consistently attend throughout the year.”
Perhaps next in the family to continue the legacy, Hernández is hopeful his recent analog mission will build his resume for space exploration. He spent two weeks this spring isolated with five other crew members inside a two-story cylinder in the Utah desert as part of the Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS) mission, designed to simulate life on Mars.
An engineer by training, Hernández’s role on “Mars” was crew botanist. Plant life will be a critical piece of supporting astronauts on “The Red Planet,” because they’ll have to grow most of what they eat. However, because Mars is too cold and gets much less sunlight than Earth, plants must be grown inside the habitation station in a very controlled environment.
“The idea is to bring in some starting amount of soil from Earth that we know we can grow plants in. We would add in some Martian regulate to expand our production; it’s very expensive to transport things from Earth to Mars, so the less mass you send to Mars, the less expensive the mission will be,” says Hernández. “We want to find the right ratio between Earth soil and Martian regulate, so we can still grow healthy plants to be consumed by the crew.”
Hernández says he wants to be “a bridge builder” like his dad—inspiring children from every walk of life to dream about space, including his very own.
“It would be fun to start a Hernandez lineage of astronauts, kind of like Captain Kirk on Star Trek,” laughs Hernández, “where they’re known explorers that always venture out to the edge of unknown.”
Ojeda blazing a trail to space for others
Oscar Ojeda, who lived in Columbia until recently, remembers his boyhood pretend space adventures; he would wear multiple jackets to create a puffy spacesuit and squirm into his “space capsule” under his bed. It seemed an unlikely dream, because his home country doesn’t have a space program—but he’s working to change that.
Ojeda completed a two-week analog mission at the International MoonBase Alliance’s research station, Hawai’i Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS). The habitat is a small dome that sits on the moon-like terrain of a barren volcano slope on Hawaii’s Big Island at an elevation of about 8,000 feet. Ojeda was isolated with five other crew members inside the dome, which is equipped with limited water and electrical systems and a single porthole for the only window. As is standard with analog missions, crew members only leave the habitat wearing spacesuits.
Ojeda completed his undergraduate degree in his home country, but says, “I have always loved space and aerospace, so Purdue was always on my radar.” He’s now a bona fide Boilermaker and will earn his master’s degree from the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics later this summer.
Outreach is a significant part of Ojeda’s journey to space; he created a space group at Universidad Nacional de Colombia, the largest public university in the country and where he earned his undergraduate degree. His efforts included an introduction course to aerospace in Spanish.
“There’s not a lot of information about outer space in Spanish, so to be able to talk about space in Spanish is important. Because of Covid, we did a virtual version of the class on YouTube…so people would have a tool in their own language,” says Ojeda. “We had over 1,000 people registered and 200 at the end, so that’s a very good retention rate for an online class.”
HI-SEAS was Ojeda’s third analog mission; this particular assignment was to “observe human factors we can introduce to the logistics and operations of the station, so we can make life for astronauts easier.” He’s the first Columbian to be part of an analog mission at HI-SEAS MoonBase Alliance’s research station.
“[Being the first Columbian] is circumstantial—not to diminish I’ve done it. I want to do it more for representation—showing our people it’s possible, and they also can achieve what they want,” says Ojeda. “But going to space doesn’t consume me; this is more of a journey. Of course, I would love to go to space, but if I’m able to contribute to others doing it and the general field, I’ll be happy. Hopefully, I’ll get to go to space, but if not, I’ll be happy to walk the road.”
Hernández became the unofficial chef for the mission and says cooking for the crew was challenging using only dehydrated food and very limited water.
On his recent analog moon mission, Ojeda led six research projects related to human factors of life at the station.