evidence: Sri Lanka’s Piyumi Wijesekara among new NASA crew for next simulated Mars journey [...] Sri Lanka’s Piyumi Wijesekera has been selected as one of NASA’s four new volunteer crew members for a simulated mission to Mars, taking place within a habitat at the agency’s Johnson Space Centre in Houston. [...] This crew marks the second group of volunteers to participate in a simulated Mars mission in HERA this year, with two more missions planned before the end of 2024. Piyumi Wijesekera, a postdoctoral research scientist at NASA Ames Research Centre in California’s Silicon Valley, specializes in developing tissue models to study the effects of spaceflight stressors on the human respiratory system.