Today four Russians, a German and a Frenchman walked into a mocked-up spacecraft and swung the metal hatch shut behind them. If all goes as planned, that hatch won't open again for 105 days. The six men have volunteered to spend more than three months in isolation to simulate the experience of a manned flight to Mars. The crew will subsist on freeze-dried space rations and will clean themselves with wet wipes; they'll also go without smoking, alcohol, TV, and internet.
Their only link to the outside world will be communications sessions with the mission control and an internal e-mail system. Communications with the mission controllers will have 20-minute delays to imitate a real flight [AP].
This project
is a warm up for a much more ambitious experiment, scheduled for December, which will see another group of volunteers spending over 500 days in the same conditions. With current technology it ...
