The 6 crewmembers of the Mars 500 mission waved goodbye to the outside world for the last time this week (June 3rd 2010) at the start of what will be 520 days of isolation as they try to simulate as accurately as possible a manned flight to Mars and back.

Diego Urbina and Romain Charles from Europe, Sukhrob Kamolov, Alexey Sitev, Alexandr Smoleevskiy and Mikhail Sinelnikov from Russia and Wang Yue from China will live and work as the astronauts would in reality, also eating the same food and exercising in an identical manner as crew members onboard the International Space Station.

Their days will be divided up equally between work, leisure and rest time, and as well as an 18 month supply of food and equipment on board the ‘spacecraft’ they have taken films, books, games and musical instruments with which to entertain themselves.

The men will have to rapidly adjust both mentally and physically to being contained within a closed environment with restricted space, and a regime of daily exercise for up to 2 hours will be important to maintain physical condition. Unfortunately though they will only be able to shower once a week so a poor sense of smell would probably be a good thing!

The Mars 500 experiment will be excellent for simulating the living conditions, work routine and stresses of living as a small group in a confined space and should therefore give some valuable feedback and data. However, there are important factors that cannot be simulated in this way on Earth, such as the effects of long term exposure of astronauts to radiation and microgravity. It is imperative for the safety of crew members on any future long-term manned mission that we gain a better understanding of the physiological processes that lie behind such effects.

Think you could cope with being locked up in 4 windowless, metal, interlocking modules measuring less than 550 cubic metres, 24 hours a day, every day, for nearly 18 months? If that's not bad enough then how about sharing that small space with 5 other people that you barely know.

This is exactly what 6 lucky or brave or foolhardy (depending on your point of view) people will be doing from May this year, all in the name of science. But if mankind really wants to conduct a manned flight to Mars, then this is exactly what will be needed. 

Mars500, a joint project run by the European Space Agency and the Russian Institute for Biomedical Problems will simulate the space flight to Mars and back again, keeping everything as true to life as possible. Once locked into the capsule the 'crew' will only have personal contact with each other, plus voice contact with a simulated mission control and occasionally from family members - and even then with a 20 minute delay built in to simulate the real time delay of a Mars mission.

The assignment will begin with all the food on-board needed for the entire duration of the experiment, the diet similar to that of the crew on the International Space Station (ISS) - and they will have to stick to rationing to make it last. The crew will be given tasks to do such as maintenance, daily exercise, and scientific experiments, plus the occasional emergency simulation thrown in for good measure. All team members will be monitored throughout the mission with recordings taken of medical, psychological and physical signs.

All 6 candidates have now been selected with the final composition being 2 Europeans, 1 Chinese, and 3 Russians, and don't you just hope that they all get along well together for the sake of their sanity! 

Click on the ESA link to discover more:
http://www.esa.int/esaMI/Mars500/index.html