Official News page 5

REAL LIFE NEWS: MARS MISSION REACHES ITS (SIMULATED) DESTINATION

by Hazed

Six men have been sealed inside steel containers since June, and they have now gone into orbit as their spacecraft reaches its destination: Mars.

Well, not really because this is a simulated mission to investigate some of the psychological and physiological effects that humans might encounter on a long space voyage.

The participants in the Mars500 project, which is run jointly by Russia's Institute of Biomedical Problems and the European Space Agency, will now put on real spacesuits and "descend" to the planet, walking around on the "surface" of Mars - or rather, the sandy floor of another module of the experiment. The main difference will be the gravity, which on Mars would be a lot lower. There's no way to simulate that.

So far, the experiment has gone well, with no major problems. The three Russians, two EU citizens and one Chinese national taking part have had their health - physical and mental - constantly monitored. To make the simulation as realistic as possible, communications between the module and the outside world have been subject to a delay, and they have had to deal with simulated emergencies such as a power failure.

They are due to arrive "back on Earth" in November.

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