Here is a statement on what they are trying to accomplish with this year long “Mars dome” if you will:

“We hope that this upcoming mission will build on our current understanding of the social and psychological factors involved in long-duration space exploration,” Kim Binsted, principal investigator for HI-SEAS, said in a statement from the University of Hawaii.

Hopefully this will be useful in learning how to send astronauts on longer missions.

And some may or not remember an experiment that originated in the 90s called Biosphere 2 and this video discusses what happened:

Jane Poynter tells her story of living two years and 20 minutes in Biosphere 2 — an experience that provoked her to explore how we might sustain life in the harshest of environments. This is the first TED talk drawn from an independently organized TEDx event, held at the University of Southern California.

thanks to space.com for the great info

thanks to HI-SEAS/University of Hawaii for the pic