Six volunteers from Russia and Europe inside the capsule at a Moscow research facility where they had been locked away for the last three months to simulate a mission to Mars.
Credit: ESA
MOSCOW: Six volunteers from Russia and Europe emerged from a capsule inside a Moscow research facility yesterday where they had been locked away for the last three months to simulate a mission to Mars.
The six men stepped out of the module smiling and in apparent good health after 105 days cut off from the outside world at the isolation facility at the Russian Institute for Biomedical Problems.
At precisely 1000 GMT, an engineer removed the lock on the hatch, cut the seal and the all-male team stepped outside the capsule that had been their home for the last three months.
Dressed in blue overalls like real-life spacemen, the four Russians, a Frenchman and a German were handed bouquets of flowers and waved at well-wishers as they stood arm-in-arm outside the capsule.
"The experiment has been a success," the Russian 'commander' of the crew, Sergei Ryazansky, formally reported to his superiors from the Russian space agency Roskosmos.
"I hope that the results will be useful for everyone, including on Earth," said Cyrille Fournier of France, a commercial airline pilot for Air France, told reporters at a news conference afterwards. "The hardest thing was the way that sleep was disturbed for the sake of the experiments and that fact that we could not see the day."
Ryazansky rejected the idea of any major confrontations in the 'Big Brother' style set-up: "The psychological training we received allowed us to avoid any conflict ... It was really respectful, polite."
While their module had stayed firmly on Earth at the Moscow research centre, the experiment was aimed at replicating exactly the conditions of a manned mission to Mars. It included including launch, the outward journey, arrival, transfer to and from the Martian surface and finally the long journey home and unexpected emergency situations
Scientists have been monitoring the psychological and physical effects of the prolonged isolation on the participants and are hoping this will bring a better understanding of the problems of long-term space flight.
The experiment - a joint venture between the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Russian institute - is only the precursor to an even more daunting project planned for early 2010. This will see a six-member crew locked up in the same capsule but this time for 520 days, the estimated time for a return trip to Mars, ESA said in a statement.
The six have for the last three months lived in the 550 cubic metre facility which has tiny individual bedrooms a maximum of 3.2 square metres in area.
