Sri Lanka’s Piyumi Wijesekera Joins NASA’s Simulated Mars Mission Crew

Piyumi Wijesekera from Sri Lanka has been chosen as one of NASA’s four new volunteer crew members for a simulated mission to Mars, to be conducted at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Wijesekera will be joined by Jason Lee, Stephanie Navarro, and Shareef Al Romaithi. The team is set to enter NASA’s Human Exploration Research Analog (HERA) on Friday, May 10th. They will spend 45 days living and working like astronauts, emerging from the facility on June 24th to simulate their “return” to Earth. Jose Baca and Brandon Kent are designated as alternate crew members for this mission.

HERA provides valuable insights into how crew members adapt to isolation, confinement, and remote conditions, which is crucial for preparing astronauts for deep space missions to destinations like the Moon and Mars.

During the simulated mission to Mars, the crew will carry out scientific research and operational tasks, including virtual “walks” on Mars’s surface and managing communication delays with the Mission Control Centre of up to five minutes each way as they “approach” Mars.

This mission is the second of four planned simulated Mars missions in HERA this year. Piyumi Wijesekera, a postdoctoral research scientist at NASA Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley, specializes in developing tissue models to study the effects of spaceflight stressors on the human respiratory system.

Wijesekera holds a bachelor’s degree in bioengineering from the University of California, San Diego, and master’s and doctorate degrees in biomedical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her doctoral research focused on stem cell and organ engineering, with a particular emphasis on engineering lung models to study respiratory diseases.

Residing in San Francisco, Wijesekera enjoys spending time with family and friends, running along the San Francisco Bay, reading, hiking, volunteering at a food pantry, and attending concerts and musicals.