The first Monsaraz Mars Analog Mission, held in 2025, featured INESC TEC as the scientific leader. Following the success of that inaugural edition, Monsaraz and the Observatório Lago-Alqueva have been selected as the venue and host for AMADEE-27, an analog Mars mission organised by the Austrian Space Forum (OeWF), with the support of INESC TEC and NUCLIO. Applications are now open until 6 September for researchers in fields including robotics, astrobiology and geosciences, life sciences, and human factors.
April 2027 has been set as the date for the AMADEE-27 mission to take place in the Monsaraz and Alqueva region. As with the first edition, the mission has been designed to recreate, in a terrestrial environment, the challenges astronauts may face during future missions to Mars.
Over the course of two weeks, analog astronauts will take part in a series of experiments, including testing equipment and robotic vehicles, to simulate the Martian environment – further information about the mission is available here.
This time, the mission will be supported by a Mission Control Centre based in Austria, alongside an operations and logistics team in Monsaraz responsible for managing activities on site.
The first mission, although involving an international team, was led by Portugal, with Ana Pires – the first Portuguese woman scientist-astronaut – heading the Mission Control Centre (MCC) alongside Slavka Carvalho Andrejkovičová, from the University of Aveiro and a NASA collaborator. INESC TEC researcher Diogo Paupério also took part in the mission as Flight Engineer / Robotics Specialist. Since then, the researcher’s expertise in the field has continued to grow. Diogo Paupério recently returned from the SOLIS100 mission, a 100-day isolation mission led by the German Aerospace Center (DLR) with support from the European Space Agency (ESA).
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