mars500
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Moscow Mars flight simulation comes to close after 520 days
For the past 520 days, six men have been taking part in an experiment -- Mars500, a simulation of the effects of long-duration space flight carried out at the Moscow Institute. Over the last 17 months and change, the crew has had its stress and hormone levels monitored, been subject to studies on isolation and dietary supplements and has had its communication with the outside world severely hampered. The crew emerged earlier today, happy to be back, after never really having left. After release, the half-dozen members were taken to quarantine to be checked out by doctors. The scientists running the show seem satisfied with data gathered during the study and are hoping to take things to the next level, conducting a similar experiment in orbit.
Simulated Mars mission simulating return to Earth as we speak, astronauts genuinely overjoyed
We thought the Hundred Year Starship initiative to strand aged astronauts on Mars by 2030 was depressing, and in comparison the European Space Agency's Mars-500 project is little more than a walk in the park (a very small, confined, and extremely monotonous park). Essentially Bio-Dome re-written to simulate travel to Mars and back (without that lovable scamp Pauly Shore), the project bills itself as "the first full duration simulation of a manned flight to Mars," with astronauts conducting a 640-day voyage to the red planet and back -- all without leaving the Russian Academy of Sciences' Institute of Biomedical Problems (IBMP). Members of the crew "landed" on Mars on February 12th of this year, returning to the craft on February 24th. As we speak, they should be entering into a spiral orbit away from Mars, and with any luck they'll be back just in time for their ticker-tape parade on November 5th (hopefully that part isn't a simulation). A joint experiment by the European Space Agency, Russia, and China, the $15 million project studies the complex psychological and technical challenges encountered on long spaceflights.
