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Feb 12, 2011
Mars500 is a $15 million experiment being run by the European Space Agency, Russia and China. It "launched" in June, when six male crew members were locked inside a windowless mock spaceship at the Institute of Biomedical Problems in Moscow. The project simulates a 500-day trip to Mars and back — hence the name. After about eight months of virtual interplanetary travel, the crew members — three Russians, two Europeans and a Chinese — are getting set to "land" on Mars tomorrow.
Mars500 aims to study what astronauts on a long-duration spaceflight would experience. Understanding the stresses of such a journey is a major step toward preventing or mitigating them, researchers said.
"The goal is, predict everything we can, prevent anything we can before the mission, detect anything that goes wrong in the mission, and intervene once we've detected it," Dinges told Space.com.
For analog experiments to provide useful information, they should create conditions as close as possible to those experienced on the surface of the moon, say, or on the long journey to Mars.
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