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A 500-day mock mission to Mars may seem to some like an elaborate stunt, but the ongoing experiment — now at the Martian "landing" stage — has great potential to help prepare future astronauts for a real trip to the Red Planet, experts say.
The Mars500 mission has reached its halfway point, with volunteer "astronauts" getting set to make a simulated landing on Mars tomorrow (Feb. 12). The project should help scientists and mission planners better understand — and perhaps mitigate — the psychological and physiological stresses a long space journey would impose on crewmembers, researchers said.
"This is the start of getting fundamental behavioral ecology data from long-duration confinement," said David Dinges, a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania who is leading a study attached to the Mars500 project. "It's a rare opportunity."
Analog of a Mars journey
Mars500 is a $15 million experiment being run by the European Space Agency, Russia and China. It "launched" last June, when six male crewmembers were locked inside a windowless mock spaceship at the Institute of Biomedical Problems in Moscow.
The project simulates a 500-day trip to Mars and back — hence the name. After about eight months of virtual interplanetary travel, the crewmembers — three Russians, two Europeans and a Chinese — are getting set to "land" on Mars tomorrow.
Mars500 aims to study what astronauts on a long-duration spaceflight would experience. Understanding the stresses of such a journey is a major step toward preventing or mitigating them, researchers said.
"The goal is, predict everything we can, prevent anything we can before the mission, detect anything that goes wrong in the mission, and intervene once we've detected it," Dinges told SPACE.com.
Analog studies such as Mars500 are standard practice in spaceflight research. NASA does a great deal of such work, for example, including its annual Research and Technology Studies demonstrations in the Arizona desert (known as Desert RATS).
For analog experiments to provide useful information, they should create conditions as close as possible to those experienced on the surface of the moon, say, or on the long journey to Mars.
"You try to make it as high-fidelity as feasible, within your cost budget and within the architectural plans of what you envision," said Desert RATS mission manager Joe Kosmo, of NASA's Johnson Space Center. "The higher fidelity you can implement into it, the more success you would have."
The Mars500 mission has reached its halfway point, with volunteer "astronauts" getting set to make a simulated landing on Mars tomorrow (Feb. 12). The project should help scientists and mission planners better understand — and perhaps mitigate — the psychological and physiological stresses a long space journey would impose on crewmembers, researchers said.
"This is the start of getting fundamental behavioral ecology data from long-duration confinement," said David Dinges, a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania who is leading a study attached to the Mars500 project. "It's a rare opportunity."
Analog of a Mars journey
Mars500 is a $15 million experiment being run by the European Space Agency, Russia and China. It "launched" last June, when six male crewmembers were locked inside a windowless mock spaceship at the Institute of Biomedical Problems in Moscow.
The project simulates a 500-day trip to Mars and back — hence the name. After about eight months of virtual interplanetary travel, the crewmembers — three Russians, two Europeans and a Chinese — are getting set to "land" on Mars tomorrow.
Mars500 aims to study what astronauts on a long-duration spaceflight would experience. Understanding the stresses of such a journey is a major step toward preventing or mitigating them, researchers said.
"The goal is, predict everything we can, prevent anything we can before the mission, detect anything that goes wrong in the mission, and intervene once we've detected it," Dinges told SPACE.com.
Analog studies such as Mars500 are standard practice in spaceflight research. NASA does a great deal of such work, for example, including its annual Research and Technology Studies demonstrations in the Arizona desert (known as Desert RATS).
For analog experiments to provide useful information, they should create conditions as close as possible to those experienced on the surface of the moon, say, or on the long journey to Mars.
"You try to make it as high-fidelity as feasible, within your cost budget and within the architectural plans of what you envision," said Desert RATS mission manager Joe Kosmo, of NASA's Johnson Space Center. "The higher fidelity you can implement into it, the more success you would have."
