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The crew of a simulated Mars mission has "touched down" on the Red Planet.
Monday's milestone marks the halfway point in an ambitious year-and-a-half isolation experiment, aimed at testing the strains of traveling through the solar system.
When two of the six "Mars 500" astronauts performed a spacewalk on Monday, it was their first sortie, after eight months of cramped living in a 160-square-meter module on the outskirts of Moscow.
The crew plans to complete two more extra-vehicular jaunts before next week, when the project is scheduled to begin its "return trip."
The researchers who enlisted to be locked up in a mock spacecraft for 520 days are from Russia, Europe, and China. The ambitious experiment is the first full-duration simulation of a manned flight to the Red Planet.
Martin Zell, Director of ESA-ISS Scientific Program, said, "Our ambition is to have this as controlled as possible, not to have any kinds of glitches, not to have any kinds of sensational things. We just want to do a very smooth mission, a very controlled mission, and to elaborate the means of how to do a real space flight mission in the future."
Psychologists say the long confinement was expected to put the team members under tremendous stress, as they grow increasingly tired of each other's company.
Such conditions can even be more challenging during an artificial operation than a real flight, because the crew doesn't experience any of the euphoria or dangers of actual space travel.
The idea is to closely mimic the timetable of a manned mission to Mars -- 250 days for the actual journey, a month of orbiting and making surface landings, followed by a 240 day return trip back to Earth -- shuttling through imaginary cosmos all the way, and totally cut off from their home world.
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Technicians watch a feed from the Mars 500 project at mission
control in the town of Korolyov on the outskirts of Moscow
February 14, 2011. REUTERS/Alexander Natruskin |
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The Mars-500 isolation facility is seen on a monitor during a mock
walk on Mars by volunteers of the Mars-500 experiment, Diego Urbina
of Italy and Alexander Smoleyevsky of Russia, at the Korolev Space
Mission Control Center outside Moscow. (AFP/Alexander Nemenov) |
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Graphic on the Mars 500, an 18-month mission involving six men
living inside a mock-up spaceship module on the edge of Moscow,
to simulate a future mission to Mars. (AFP/Graphic) |
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When two of the six "Mars 500" astronauts performed
a spacewalk on Monday, it was their first sortie,
after eight months of cramped living in a 160-square
-meter module on the outskirts of Moscow. |
全球公众传媒摘编：GAN JADE |
