Mars 500

Mars500 crew 'arrives at Red Planet' on simulated mission

    This article is about an experiment that is currently going on that might help us plan for a future expedition to Mars. The ESA (European Space Agency) is helping with this simulation but Russia's Institute of Biomedical Problems is actually conducting and facilitating this experiment. The test subjects have just entered the “orbit of mars” stage and have not run across many signs of any physical or psychological effects, however they have not been able to stimulate the zero gravity of space so the results my not be accurate. This simulation is called Mars500 because it is expected to take 520 days to complete a trip to mars however it is estimated to take a lot longer. They are trying to test for multiple problems that could go on and for a day they cut power to simulation and the crew had to work to restore it. This could be a major step towards sending humans to Mars however it could still be a while before we have to funding for such a huge expedition.

I think that is experiment could be highly useful but at the same time it is a little controversial. From this we could find out how to accommodate for deep space travel and how prolonged isolation alters a person. However the fact that they are locking six people up in a facility and then testing them to see how they can mess them up by cutting the power or creating other malfunctions is a bit strange. I understand that they volunteered to do this but it seems obvious that isolating humans for 520 days will alter there physical and physiological state. I hope that there is some good data that comes from this because I find space travel very interesting and the idea of sending people to mars is very fascinating to me.