Mars500 crewmembers testing the Russian Orlan suits before their mission started in early June 2010.
Credit: IBMP/ Oleg Voloshin
The Mars terrain simulator of the Mars500 facility. The crew will drive a rover and place sensors during their sorties.
Credit: IBMP/ Oleg Voloshin
MOSCOW: A group of volunteers will reach a key stage in an unprecedented one-and-a-half year virtual interplanetary flight experiment to study the effects of a mission to Mars when they ‘land’ on the Red Planet's surface.
Three of the six volunteers in the Mars500 experiment will ‘touch down’ after 244 days of virtual flight before moving out of their lander for a first ‘space walk’ on the Martian surface - all without leaving a Moscow research centre.
“Mars500 is a visionary experiment,” said Simonetta Di Pippo, European Space Agency (ESA) director for human spaceflight. “Europe is getting ready to make a step further in space exploration: our technology and our science grow stronger every day. Mars500 today is only an enriching simulation, but we are working to make it real.”
Halfway there
The landing marks the approximate halfway point for the experiment in which the participants must spend 520 days in isolation from the world to test how humans would respond to the pressures of the long voyage to Mars.
The first steps on Mars of the three volunteers from Italy, Russia and China will be relayed to the flight control centre that monitors real space missions, as part of an experiment organised by the EPA in Paris and Moscow's Institute of Biomedical Problems (IBMP).
A team of six men from Europe, Russia and China, has been locked since June in a mock-up spaceship to test the psychological effects of an 18-month round trip in the experiment.
Crew crammed into imitation modules
The volunteers aged from mid-20s to late 30s, among them engineers, doctors and a physicist, are crammmed into hermetically sealed modules just 20 m long and less than 4 m across, imitating a Mars spacecraft at the IBMP in Moscow. Phone calls are barred, although e-mail and radio communication is allowed, with a time delay, and the men eat the same food in tubes as astronauts.
Russian Alexander Smoleyevsky, Italian Diego Urbina and Chinese Wang Yue are the three who will land on Mars while Romain Charles from France and Sukhrob Kamolov and Alexey Sitev from Russia ‘remain in orbit’ on a different module.
With the world's media watching, Smoleyevsky and Urbina will don modified Russian Orlan spacesuits and exit the lander’s airlock for the first of three space walks onto a simulated Martian surface next to their capsule.
