Posted 08.16.2011 at 11:58 am
11 Comments
Get Us Out of Here
ESA
An increasingly pale six-member crew on a fake mission to Mars has just reached a new landmark: 438 days in isolation. The streak beats the record held by someone who actually spent that time in space, former Mir space station resident Valeri Polyakov.
The Mars500 crew is just a couple months away from returning to Earth after a simulated round trip to the Red Planet. In February, the crew “landed” on Mars and three crew members donned spacesuits, stepping out of their capsule for the first time in 250 days to walk on the fake Martian surface. The European Space Agency, which is sponsoring the experiment, said the crew is now enduring the most difficult part of the mission — several months of isolation in a cramped cabin with no Mars-walk to look forward to.
The point is to study the psychological and physical toll of long-distance space travel, to help prepare actual space crews that would need to spend more than a year cooped up in a spacecraft en route to Mars. If the Mars500 crew’s video and photo diaries are any indication, participants will turn kind of wacky as a coping mechanism.
The crew is living in a wood-paneled simulated space capsule in a Moscow parking lot, and is scheduled to “return” on Nov. 5. Each man is free to walk out at any time, but they’re all committed for the long haul, ESA said.
11 Comments
To comment, please Login.
Popular Tags
Science
|
|
|
|
|
|
June 2013: American Energy Independence
Five amazing, clean technologies that will set us free, in this month's energy-focused issue. Also: how to build a better bomb detector, the robotic toys that are raising your children, a human catapult, the world's smallest arcade, and much more.
Popular on Popsci
Most Commented
Science
- Dear Schools: Stop Treating Science-Curious Kids Like Criminals
- Scientists Create First Cloned Human Embryo
- State Drops Charges Against High School Student Arrested For Science Experiment
- Mexican Cartels Control Pot Farms As Far North As Washington State
- Buzz Aldrin Wants To Send People On A One-Way Trip To Mars
- Giving White People The Illusion Of Darker Skin Makes Them Less Racist
- Space Tourism's Black Carbon Problem
- What Modern Humans Can Learn From The Neanderthals' Extinction
- Untouched For The Last Billion Years, Water In Canadian Mine Holds Ingredients For Life
- How Do You Make A Painkiller Addiction-Proof?
Most Emailed
Science
- The Week In Numbers: Fire In Space, The First Cloned Human Embryo, And More
- 8 Of The Year's Most Oddly Gorgeous Science Images
- 8 Of The Year's Most Oddly Gorgeous Science Images
- A Zombie Worm And Other Amazing Images From This Week
- A Zombie Worm And Other Amazing Images From This Week
- Cambrian Fossil With Scissor-Like Claws Is Named For Johnny Depp
- First American Mission To Sample An Asteroid Gets Green Light
- High School Students Devise More Accurate Climate Modeling Method
- Wanna Know How You're Going To Survive The Apocalypse?
- This Bacterium Can Do Division, Compute Logarithms And Take Square Roots
Most Viewed
Science
- The Week In Numbers: Fire In Space, The First Cloned Human Embryo, And More
- 8 Of The Year's Most Oddly Gorgeous Science Images
- 8 Of The Year's Most Oddly Gorgeous Science Images
- A Zombie Worm And Other Amazing Images From This Week
- A Zombie Worm And Other Amazing Images From This Week
- Cambrian Fossil With Scissor-Like Claws Is Named For Johnny Depp
- First American Mission To Sample An Asteroid Gets Green Light
- High School Students Devise More Accurate Climate Modeling Method
- Wanna Know How You're Going To Survive The Apocalypse?
- This Bacterium Can Do Division, Compute Logarithms And Take Square Roots
Online Content Director: Suzanne LaBarre | Email
Senior Editor: Paul Adams | Email
Associate Editor: Dan Nosowitz | Email
Assistant Editor: Colin Lecher | Email
Assistant Editor: Rose Pastore | Email
Contributing Writers:
Rebecca Boyle | Email
Kelsey D. Atherton | Email
Francie Diep | Email
Shaunacy Ferro | Email
Today on PopSci.com
Copyright © 2012 Popular Science
A Bonnier Corporation Company. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
i hope they will put the "earth flag" on mars
when they will land on it ^^
Im just proud to be earthian... :)
I wonder what the record is for a submariner staying underwater. Perhaps this record is equaled or already broken long ago and well it's just not spoken about.
Good. I just hope their are no christians on Mars.
There will be Christians on Mars, that’s a given.
I think they are already feeling the effects of isolation (one dude is either making a bird or throwing up gang signs)
This is pointless, they already did this in the biosphere project. This does not simulate weightlessness, or radiation, both huge factors in long term space travel.
boka is the kind reason I wrote to PopSci to tell them to take out the comments section because this ALWAYS HAPPENS.
Very true, comments are truly not needed on these articles at all. Think of all the Spam they could eliminate from the Chinese Commercial Sites trying to sell me cheap knock-off shoes from a PopSci page...
@BubbaGump
im sure people that make a living working underground and underwater would make perfect candidates for a mars mission.
christians are like rats on a ship. they always find ways of surviving and traveling long distances.
i hope there's no ghetto on Mars.
@Boka
@JediMindset
"Absence of proof is not proof of absence."
Don't be so hasty to judge. Exactly what credentials do either of you possess to give any kind of meaningful commentary on Christianity or any other religion for that matter?
@Great Big Pwner
i was just kidding. it was a joke. of course religion is good for some people. keeps them distracted/entertained. for the rest of us, we just dont need it. sorry i got carried away.
@drinny26
The ghetto shall reside wherever a particular group of people are circumstantially channeled to live in substandard societal conditions, placed at the bottom to just beneath the working class.
Bottom line, the ghetto is coming to a star system near you!
"I'm rich, beeotch!!" (honk, honk)