HI-SEAS crew wraps up mock mission with pictures of their Hawaiian adventure

It's the final countdown for a hardy group of people who have been on "Mars" for the past four months. On Friday (July 25), the HI-SEAS crew will make their return after simulating Red Planet exploration in Hawaii. And you can bet there are certain things they are missing about the outside world, or "Earth".

"I haven't seen a tree, smelled the rain, heard a bird, or felt wind on my skin in four months," said Casey Stedman, the commander of the latest Hawai'i-Space Exploration and Analog Simulation, said in a statement on Instagram's blog yesterday (July 20). Added chief technologist Ross Lockwood, "We've basically been subsisting on mush. Flavorful mush, but mush nonetheless."

Despite the sacrifices, there's a certain excitement to doing four solid months of experiments and "spacewalks" and other Martian activities. Luckily for us, the crew has been liveblogging their adventures on social media! Below the jump is some of their best Instagram photos from the trip.

HI-SEAS aims to closely simulate Mars exploration. The University of Hawaii runs the site, and every field season volunteers apply to participate in the missions. The first mission took place in 2012 and lasted 118 days. This mission is taking place in the same location, high on the slope of the Mauna Loa volcano.

Besides Instagram, some of the crew members are also accessible on Twitter. You can follow them at @rosslockwood, @Space_Chicken_, @TSwarmer and @casey_stedman. You can also read more about HI-SEAS on its official site.

Full disclosure: I am a classmate of Tiffany Swarmer's in the Space Studies department at the University of North Dakota. She and the department have not asked me to write this article, nor were they aware of its publication before it went online.