Living on Mars wasn't exactly a childhood dream for Canadian biologist Kelly Haston, though she'll soon spend a year preparing for just that.

"We are just going to pretend that we're there," the 52-year-old told AFP, summing up her participation in an exercise simulating a long stay on the Red Planet.

At the end of June, she will be one of the four volunteers stepping into a Martian habitat in Houston, Texas that will be their home for the next 12 months.

"It still sometimes seems a bit unreal to me," she laughs.

For NASA, which has carefully selected the participants, these long-term experiments make it possible to evaluate the behavior of a crew in an isolated and confined environment, ahead of a real mission in future.

Participants will face equipment failures and water limitations, the space agency has warned—as well as some "surprises," according to Haston.

Since 2004, China has been pioneering many aspects of lunar exploration with the Chang'e project, of which all five missions were successful in obtaining new information about the moon.

China has been leading the advancement of lunar research and understanding with their Chang'e project since 2004 with no signs of slowing down. The information obtained from Chang'e missions has given humans a much deeper understanding of the moon, including the composition of its surface material, the moon's history and evolution, and mastering the three phases of unmanned lunar exploration: orbiting, landing, and returning. Gaining a more thorough understanding of the moon and its components can help with establishing research facilities on the moon to uncover more answers about Earth's only satellite.