Mars 500: Countdown starts for gruelling mission in Moscow car park →
Tomorrow six men will be sealed inside a mock-up spaceship in Moscow, where they will spend the next 520 days testing how well humans cope with the stress of a return trip to Mars. After a year of strenuous astronaut training, six men will clamber into a capsule tomorrow afternoon for a journey like no other. Their mission? To boldly go – well, nowhere.
The men, who were chosen from thousands of highly qualified applicants, are the crew for a simulated round-trip to Mars, a mission that requires them to be sealed for 520 days inside a mock-up spaceship that sits in a Moscow car park.
The European Space Agency (Esa) experiment, called Mars 500, is designed to explore how humans cope with the stress, confinement and severely limited company that will confront future astronauts on missions to the farthest reaches of the solar system. To keep the would-be astronauts on their toes, agency officials will simulate equipment failures and medical emergencies. Regular medical checks and psychological appraisals will reveal how well – or how badly – the men are faring.
The crew, three Russians, two Europeans and one Chinese, will spend most of their 18-month stay in the “habitable module” of the spaceship, a steel capsule the size of a bendy bus that has six sparsely furnished bedrooms built into it. Another capsule attached to the living quarters contains a gym, an artificial greenhouse and space for supplies such as food and water. A third capsule is the medical room.
The crew will spend 250 days performing flight tasks and experiments on their “journey to the Red Planet” before climbing into a mockup of a landing module, from which they will step out in spacesuits onto a simulated Martian surface. After 30 days working on the surface – essentially a large sandpit – the crew face a 240-day “return trip”.
The only contact the men will have with the outside world will be via a radio link to the space agency’s “ground control” staff. To make the trip more realistic, their conversations will have a built-in time delay of up to 20 minutes: the time it takes for radio signals to reach Mars from Earth.
Space agencies have simulated long missions before, though not always successfully. An experiment at the same Moscow facility in 1999 descended into chaos when a Russian captain forced a kiss on a female Canadian crew member, and two other Russians got drunk and ended up in a fist fight that left blood spattered over the capsule walls.
Mars 500: Countdown starts for gruelling mission in Moscow car park →
Tomorrow six men will be sealed inside a mock-up spaceship in Moscow, where they will spend the next 520 days testing how well humans cope with the stress of a return trip to Mars. After a year of strenuous astronaut training, six men will clamber into a capsule tomorrow afternoon for a journey like no other. Their mission? To boldly go – well, nowhere.
The men, who were chosen from thousands of highly qualified applicants, are the crew for a simulated round-trip to Mars, a mission that requires them to be sealed for 520 days inside a mock-up spaceship that sits in a Moscow car park.
The European Space Agency (Esa) experiment, called Mars 500, is designed to explore how humans cope with the stress, confinement and severely limited company that will confront future astronauts on missions to the farthest reaches of the solar system. To keep the would-be astronauts on their toes, agency officials will simulate equipment failures and medical emergencies. Regular medical checks and psychological appraisals will reveal how well – or how badly – the men are faring.
The crew, three Russians, two Europeans and one Chinese, will spend most of their 18-month stay in the “habitable module” of the spaceship, a steel capsule the size of a bendy bus that has six sparsely furnished bedrooms built into it. Another capsule attached to the living quarters contains a gym, an artificial greenhouse and space for supplies such as food and water. A third capsule is the medical room.
The crew will spend 250 days performing flight tasks and experiments on their “journey to the Red Planet” before climbing into a mockup of a landing module, from which they will step out in spacesuits onto a simulated Martian surface. After 30 days working on the surface – essentially a large sandpit – the crew face a 240-day “return trip”.
The only contact the men will have with the outside world will be via a radio link to the space agency’s “ground control” staff. To make the trip more realistic, their conversations will have a built-in time delay of up to 20 minutes: the time it takes for radio signals to reach Mars from Earth.
Space agencies have simulated long missions before, though not always successfully. An experiment at the same Moscow facility in 1999 descended into chaos when a Russian captain forced a kiss on a female Canadian crew member, and two other Russians got drunk and ended up in a fist fight that left blood spattered over the capsule walls.
3rd June 2010 at 20:17
