Next time your kids tell you that making them shut down Facebook for an hour or turn off the TV and do their homework is cruel and unusual punishment, you can tell them about the team of six that the combined European and Russian space programs are about to send into a 520 day isolation experiment to determine whether human beings can withstand the mental strain of the time period it would take a crew to fly to Mars, stay there a month, then return home.
The team of six will be in a space roughly the size and dimension of the kind of ship they’d have to fly and they won’t have television or internet. They’ll be communicating with the team that will monitor their progress, but they’ll have a 20 minute delay between responses, which is what scientists estimate the communication lag would be on a real mission to Mars.
So what are they going to do with all that time? They’ll work out, a lot, and they’ll spend much of their time doing experiments. The simulation begins June 3rd and, if everything goes according to plan, the six men won’t leave the module again until November 2011. The subjects agree, it will be hard, but worth the effort if it helps them get a step closer to Mars.
This is the second long term stress test performed in the lead up to a potential Mars mission. Russian engineers recently finished a similar 105 day simulation. They say the hardest part of the simulation was knowing that they weren’t actually in space, but in a hanger in Russia.
