12-02-11 Experiment Mars500 volunteers about to land on MarsA 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 Planets 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.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 Moscows 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.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 worlds media watching,Smoleyevsky and Urbina will don modified Russian Orlan spacesuits and exit the landers airlock for the first of three space walks onto a simulated Martian surface next to their capsule.They are then due to rejoin their three colleagues who stayed in orbit around the Red Planet on February 27. For around a month, the crew will carry out scientific experiments in an environment designed to mimic that of Mars. The crew was deemed to have entered Mars's orbit on February 1.The organiser at the EPA,Jennifer Ngo-Anh,insisted that the virtual astronauts take their work very seriously."They will do everything as in a real Mars mission," she said."Of course,during a real trip to Mars,there are additional,other challenges that we have to address,for example:gravity and the problem of radiation."Despite the monotony and close quarters,the crew members were "highly motivated and enthusiastic," she said,adding that none had suffered any medical problems.Their space ship is due to take off from Mars on February 23 and to land back on Earth in November,ending 520 days of isolation.The same Moscow institute earlier carried out experiments on the effects of prolonged weightlessness in which volunteers spent a week lying in a bath.Last year,six volunteers simulated spending 105 days in a space flight.Russia plans to send a real flight to Mars in 20-30 years,possibly in a joint effort with US space agency NASA. |
