Simulated 105-day Mars mission ends

MOSCOW (UPI) -- A crew of six people Tuesday completed a 105-day simulated Mars mission, the European Space Agency said.

The crew left a special isolation facility in Moscow for the first time since March 31, ending an experiment that was part of the Mars500 program that will help scientists better understand the psychological and medical aspects of long spaceflights.

The crew included two ESA crew members: Oliver Knickel, a mechanical engineer in the German army, and Cyrille Fournier, an airline pilot from France. The remaining four were Russians: cosmonauts Sergei Ryazansky and Oleg Artemyev, Alexei Baranov, a medical doctor, and Alexei Shpakov, a sports physiologist.

"We have successfully completed our mission," said Knickel. "This is a big accomplishment that I am very proud of. I hope that the scientific data we have provided over the last months will help to make a mission to Mars possible."

During the isolation the crew faced a range of scenarios as if they really were traveling to Mars, including simulated emergencies, while coping with a communication delay of up to 20 minutes each way. The experiments were proposed by research institutes in Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, Austria, the Netherlands and Russia, as well as in the United States.

The study is the precursor to a simulation of a full 520-day mission to Mars and back, which is to start early next year.

Copyright 2009 by United Press International