KOROLYOV, Russia (Achieve3000, March 8, 2011). Have humans just landed on Mars? Not really. But an experiment is showing just what a mission to the Red Planet might be like for a crew of astronauts. Six men are on a pretend trip to Mars called Mars500. After 257 days, they "landed" on a simulated model of the planet.
The crewmembers pretended to land on February 14, 2011. Some of them left their locked, windowless steel capsule in heavy spacesuits. They trudged into a sand-covered room that was meant to look like the surface of Mars. The men planted flags. Then they took "samples" of sand from the ground. They also pretended to do experiments. Meanwhile, the remaining crewmembers were in a simulated orbit inside their spaceship.
The pretend Mars landing represented the halfway point of Mars500. It's an experiment that began in June 2010. It will run until November 2011. By that time, the crew will have spent 520 days on the simulated mission. Scientists want to see how humans deal with space travel. This will help them prepare for a real-life trip to Mars. It's a mission that would take well over a year to complete.
Three of the crewmen—Alexey Sitev, Sukhrob Kamolov, and Alexander Smoleyevsky—are from Russia. They are joined by Frenchman Romain Charles; Italian-Colombian Diego Urbina; and Wang Yue from China. The men are spending the experiment in a capsule. But they are not leaving Earth. The capsule is in Russia. It includes living areas the size of a bus. These are joined with several other rooms for experiments and exercise. The men have a supply of canned food.
Crewmembers are learning one another's languages. They also watch movies and play chess in their free time.
The Mars500 crewmembers have been sealed inside their capsule, except during the pretend landing. The only people they are around are one another. However, they speak to outsiders, just as a real space crew can. The crewmembers talk to their families using the Internet. However, the Internet connection isn't always clear in order to imitate the effects of space travel.
A real trip to Mars is decades away. This is because of huge costs and other challenges. One of those challenges would be sending humans far from Earth for the first time. Deep space has exploding stars, black holes, and more. Any of these could give off possibly harmful radiation. Scientists would need to protect crewmembers from the radiation.
In January 2010, President Barack Obama said that he thought astronauts might begin to orbit Mars by the mid-2030s.
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