The simulated eagle has finally landed, and today, two men have walked upon the red sands of fake Mars. This jaunt along a sandpit in Moscow, the latest episode in the Mars500 project designed to test human endurance, gives the cosmonauts a respite from their past eight months of windowless confinement. As the BBC reports:
"We have made great progress today," commented Vitaly Davydov, the deputy head of the Russian Federal Space Agency, who was watching a video feed of the two men. "All systems have been working normally."
Organized by Russia's Institute of Biomedical Problems and the European Space Agency, the Mars500 project seeks to better understand how humans would endure the psychological and physical effects of the isolation and confinement necessary for a real mission to Mars. The '500' in Mars500 indicates the mission's time frame--the organizers estimated that it would takes 250 days to travel to Mars, ...
