Global General

Special

Newsmaker

Asia Pacific

America

Middle East

Europe

Africa

Six volunteers return from 'mission to Mars'

(China Daily)
Updated: 2009-07-15 09:43

MOSCOW: Six volunteers from Russia and Europe Tuesday emerged from a capsule inside a Moscow research facility where they have been locked away for the last three months to simulate a mission to Mars.

The six 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 (IBMP).

Dressed in blue overalls like real-life spacemen, the four Russians, Frenchman and German were handed bouquets of flowers and waved at well-wishers as they stood arm-in-arm outside the capsule.

Related readings: Mars mission: 6 men isolated for 3 months First hard evidence found of a lake on Mars US, Europe to team up for future Mars trips In race to space, the winner was a Russian China to put 1st woman in space by 2012 - Newspaper Storms threaten Monday launch of space shuttle

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.

The volunteers were whisked away to a medical check-up and later to a news conference.

While their module had stayed firmly on Earth at the Moscow research center for the past three months, the experiment has been aimed at exactly replicating the conditions of a manned mission to Mars.

The experiment included a simulated landing on the Martian surface, communication delays of up to 20 minutes 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 IBMP - is only the precursor to an even more daunting project planned to start in 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 meter facility, which has tiny individual bedrooms a maximum of 3.2 square meters in area.

Since the hatch slammed shut on March 31, their only chance to leave was if illness or other factors forced one of the volunteers to quit the experiment. All six however have made it to the end with no reports of any major problems.

"I must admit that I have absolutely lost the feeling for time on a long-term basis," the German participant Oliver Knickel wrote in a final diary entry, published on the ESA website, before leaving the capsule.

"I absolutely have no idea about the total length of time we have spent inside the module now."

The ESA and the US space agency NASA have separately sketched dates around three decades from now for a manned flight to Mars.

The Red Planet's distance from Earth varies between 55 million kilometers and more than 400 million kilometers.

AFP