A manned mission to Mars may be decades away, but an international team of researchers will try to experience what one might be like by locking themselves up in a windowless capsule for a year-and-half – the time needed for a round-trip to the red planet.
The all-male crew of three Russians, a Frenchman, an Italian-Colombian and a Chinese will not endure weightlessness, but from Thursday they will live for 520 days in the spartan conditions of a mock spaceship and follow a harsh regimen of experiments and exercise.
The main task of the Mars-500 experiment is to study the effects of long isolation to help a real space crew of the future cope better with stress and fatigue.
“When everybody interacts with the same people in the same space, habits and behaviour become apparent very quickly. These habits may irritate and cause indignation – and even fits of aggression,” said Mikhail Baryshev, a psychotherapist who is connected to the programme.
The experiment, conducted by the Moscow-based Institute for Medical and Biological Problems in cooperation with the European Space Agency and Chinese space authorities, will simulate a 250-day journey to Mars, a 30-day surface exploration phase and 240 days return trip.
The institute in western Moscow is the nation’s premier space medicine centre; it has served the Soviet and then Russian space programmes since the dawn of the space age. The facility built for the experiment comprises several interconnected modules with a total volume of 550 cubic meters (about 20,000 cubic feet) and a separate built-in imitator of Mars surface for the mock landing.
The researchers will communicate with the outside world via Internet, delayed and occasionally disrupted to imitate the effects of space travel.
They will eat canned food similar to that currently offered to astronauts on the International Space Station and take a shower once every 10 days – mimicking space conditions. The crew will have two days off in a week, except when emergencies are simulated.
French crew member Romain Charles said the experiments will keep the team busy in isolation.
“It’s not a jail, it’s a programme, an experiment,” he said. “It will be hard I’m sure, but we have a target to stay here 520 days and we will achieve it.”
