‘Mars mission’ crew is back!

Moscow, July 14: Six volunteers from Russia and Europe on Tuesday emerged from a capsule inside a Moscow research facility on where they had 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 being cut off from the outside world for 105 days 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 once 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.

The experiment has been aimed at exactly replicating the conditions of a manned mission to Mars.

It 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 prolonged isolation on the participants and are hoping this will bring a better understanding of the problems of long-term space flight.



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