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Diego Urbina, one of the six volunteers who have been cooped up in a Moscow lab during a 520-day simulated mission to Mars, looks out from a hatch inside the Mars500 "spacecraft."
The end of a 520-day simulated mission to Mars marks one more step in a succession of make-believe trips to Mars, leading up to the real thing. And who knows? You might even be able to get in on a "sim."
Measured by length and expense, the Mars500 exercise is the most ambitious earthly simulation to date: In June of last year, the $15 million experiment put six male volunteers from Europe, Russia and China in a windowless mobile home that was set up inside Moscow's Institute for Biomedical Problems. Crew members "landed" at their destination in February, and walked out into a make-believe Mars roughly the size of an indoor tennis court.
After a months-long simulation of the return trip, the crew is scheduled to "land" back on Earth on Friday and climb out of their isolation compartment. "The longest night in the world is about to finish," simulation crew member Diego Urbina wrote today in a Twitter update. You can watch the hatch opening via the European Space Agency's website at 6 a.m. ET (11:00 CET).
Space.com
'We come in peace'
The whole idea of this simulation was to see what kinds of interpersonal problems might come up during a real 520-day mission to Mars, due to the confined space, delays in back-and-forth communication, once-a-week showers and the sense of separation from the home base. If the aim was to see whether a six-person team could survive the simulated trip without lashing out at each other, this team passed with flying colors.
"They have had their ups and downs, but these were to be expected," Patrik Sundblad, a life sciences specialist at the European Space Agency, said in an online recap of the mission. "In fact, we anticipated many more problems, but the crew has been doing surprisingly well. August was the mental low point: It was the most monotonous phase of the mission, their friends and family were on vacation and didn't send so many messages, and there was also little variation in food."
The crew's spirits lifted with the approach of the end, and Urbina could indulge in a little space levity as the final hours ticked by. "'We come in peace' ... I always wanted to say that," he wrote.
But this simulation left out some of the most important challenges that would face real Mars-bound astronauts: for example, the bone and muscle loss that comes along with spending months in zero gravity, and the risk posed by radiation exposure between here and the Red Planet. Some of those issues will be addressed in the simulated Mars missions to come.
Simulations in space
The biggest and most expensive "simulation" of a mission to Mars isn't a simulation at all: It's the multibillion-dollar operation known as the International Space Station. This month marks 11 years of continuous human presence aboard the station, and during all that time, much has been learned about coping with weightlessness. (One big problem that's come up is vision impairment. Possible coping mechanisms: artificial gravity and hibernation.)
The next few years are expected to bring additional experiments aimed at testing the waters for Mars missions. NASA has been talking about setting up time delays in Earth-to-space communications, to reflect the minutes-long light-speed travel times between Mission Control and a spaceship heading for Mars. A 10-minute time delay is on the space station's tentative science agenda for next year. Several experts have suggested attaching prototype Mars modules to the station for future test runs.
Russian space officials are thinking about conducting a Mars500-style experiment aboard the space station sometime after 2014, the Itar-Tass news agency reported today. "We are interested in staging such an experiment in actual conditions of zero gravity," Vitaly Davydov, deputy chief of Russia's Federal Space Agency, told Itar-Tass. "It is too early to say when such an experiment could be made."
If the plan goes forward, at least two astronauts would spend at least 18 months in orbit. That timetable is much longer than the typical four- to five-month tour of duty — and would set a new record for time spent in space. The current endurance record is 437 days and 18 hours, set in 1995 by Soviet cosmonaut Valery Polyakov aboard the Mir space station. Polyakov was said to suffer some low moods during his record-setting stint in space, but there were no lasting physical impairments, and by all accounts he's still healthy at the age of 69.
"I was able to stand up and walk on Earth after being in zero gravity," he told an interviewer at the New Mexico Museum of Space History in 2007, "so it should be easy to stand up and walk on Mars."
Experiments on Earth and Mars
More make-believe Mars missions will be getting under way here on the home planet. Next month, the nonprofit Mars Society will begin its 11th field season at the Mars Desert Research Station near Hanksville, Utah. Teams of volunteers cycle through tours of duty at a lonely-looking habitat in a Marslike desert environment. Part of the job is to go out in faux spacesuits and simulate surface exploration, but there are also experiments aimed at testing technologies and procedures that could come into play during a real Mars mission.
The deadline has passed for this season's crew selection, but if you want to volunteer, there's always next year. If you're selected to participate, you'll have to pay a fee and cover some of your travel expenses. The project's organizers also say you'll definitely have a "leg up" in the selection process if you're working on a research project that could yield publishable results.
During the summer, the Haughton-Mars Project provides a home away from home for researchers on Devon Island in the Canadian Arctic, one of the most Marslike places on Earth. Researchers from around the world have conducted Mars analog experiments at Haughton Crater for more than a decade.
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When do you think astronauts will be on Mars for real?
So what about the real Mars? NASA's timetable for human exploration calls for astronauts to visit the low-gravity moons of Mars in the mid-2030s, followed by forays to the planet's surface. There's lots to be done between now and then, not only to solve the challenges facing interplanetary space travelers, but also to do the robotic reconnaissance that's required in advance of human missions.
Two robotic missions are set to blast off toward the Red Planet in the next month: Russia is due to launch its Phobos-Grunt probe from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Nov. 8, with a landing on the Martian moon Phobos expected in 2013. NASA's Mars Curiosity rover arrived at its Florida launch pad today, in preparation for a Nov. 25 launch.
And then what? Some observers worry that NASA's budget woes will put a huge crimp in planetary exploration, including future missions to Mars. Scientists would love to have samples of Martian soil returned to Earth for study, but the crystal ball seems to be providing less clarity as time goes on. Will we be stuck in simulation mode forever? Feel free to weigh in with your comments below.
More about Mars:
- Citizen scientists: Help find life on Mars
- Slideshow: Greatest hits from Mars
- 'Red Dragon': A cheaper search for life on Mars
- Cosmic Log archive on Mars
Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding me to your Google+ circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.
Leave a Comment:
While I was very pleased to see the imbedded links in this article to portions of the The Mars Society website, the contention in the body of the article that we do not yet know how to deal with the health effects of weightlessness and radiation on a human Mars mission is not quite accurate. I therefore offer this link that very eloquently provides answers to these and many other key questions concerning the viability of a human Mars mission:
http://www.marssociety.org/home/about/faq
There is nothing about a human Mars mission that is beyond out current scientific or engineering capability. Further, we can do it within a decade and do not have to wait until the 2030s. What is lacking is the political will to make it happen NOW. The commitment to placing humans on Mars within a decade would carry with it many subsidiary benefits. The same hardware that enables the human Mars mission within a decade can also enable a rapid return to and occupation of the moon to exploit valuable resources in the lunar regolith for cislunar space operations such as building solar power satellites and mining lunar regolith for Helium-3, rare earth metals, and platinum group metals. The same hardware can also enable those asteroid missions that are currently so popular, but on an far shorter time scale than is now being talked about. With government shouldering the initial cost for rapidly opening up the frontiers of the Martian surface, the lunar surface, and the Legrange points, private companies can then also quickly take advantage of that initial thrust to build viable business plans to exploit the many, many economic opportunities that will be created in all of those frontiers. It is only a matter of priming the pump in order to get things rolling.
I do mention artificial gravity as a potential coping mechanism ... and I should mention the various ideas being considered for radiation shielding, ranging from just putting lots of stuff around a "safe haven" to creating an electrostatic active shielding system like the one being studied here:
http://www.nasa.gov/offices/oct/early_stage_innovation/niac/tripathi_meeting_grand_challenge.html
Mea culpa for missing your link to the article on artificial gravity in my first reading. Thank you for the NASA link on the electrostatic radiation shielding.
What pump have you been drinking from, We certainly have a lot less Helium three here on Earth than we need and I seem to recall that we are trying to diminish our supply of Plutonium. For an example energy is a resource where you get out more energy than you put in. Mining of whatever kind is based on the cost of the mining and the ability to sell the mined product at a cost higher than it cost to mine it. Shale is believed to have more oil than most estmated oil wells, but it cost more to extract the oil from shale than it does to drill for it. What kind of math are you using to figure out that bringing a hundred tons of helium ore from the Moon and extracting the couple of ounces of Helium three from it is cost beneficial. We barely brought six hundred pounds of soil and rocks from the Moon at a cost of twenty billion dollars. Exploration on a plantary scale is not the panacea its cut out to be. Other than an advancement in electronic detection devices most of it has not benefitted every day Joe Blow one iota except in higher taxes.
We can remember it for you wholesale.
"NASA's timetable for human exploration calls for astronauts to visit the low-gravity moons of Mars in the mid-2030s"
Hah! Our space agency doesn't even have spaceships anymore. Maybe my mind is deceiving me, but I seem to recollect that we were supposed to have space stations on the moon and land on Mars in the 2020's. NASA will be lucky if they still exist in 2030.
The space shuttle never was intended to go to Mars or anywhere other than earth orbit. Also, we could have somebody on the moon within a decade if we wanted to. Last I recall some dead guy set that as a goal and it happened back in the 60's. 2030 is easily within reach if we spend the funds on doing it. If we really busted our butts, I would say we could be on another planet by 2020. Of course 2020 is speculation, but I don't see it as being outside the realm of possibility. A will and $$$ is all that is needed to find the way to anywhere in this solar system.
"A will and $$$ is all that is needed to find the way to anywhere in this solar system."
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And we have neither. We should have had a moon base back int he 1970's and been on Mars before the century changed. But no one wanted to take the bull by the tail and look the situation in the eye. :)
I believe it will never happen..Its been 40 years since the last mission to the moon.""So they say"".And Russia never made it to the moon (Wonder why?).There a different between a mock exercise on Earth and a real deal of going to Mars..It called reality,nervous/fear will kick in for sure..
paragus, Russia never sent people to the Moon, because it did not want to. At that stage of technological development, there was nothing useful for people to do on the Moon. The Soviets eagerly flew rovers there, but then took years to take up on Kennedy's taunt and stopped trying as soon as the US did it — without prestige to be gained, the program was useless.
Richard
I don't doubt that we could make it to Mars and have moon stations in the 2020 decade. But I would bet it all on the stake that we won't.
NASA originally planned to send six humans to Mars way back in 1981 using NERVA-powered rockets. Unfortunately, that plan was quietly abandoned when President Nixon canceled the extraordinarily successful NERVA rocket test program in 1973 just before the first flight tests that were scheduled. Wernher von Braun proposed using the first stage of his Saturn V to boost the upper stage NERVA rocket above the thickest part of the earth's atmosphere before firing the nuclear rocket engine.
Chances are, low gravity will make long-term life on Mars impossible, so, as unpleasant as it is, Venus would be the only candidate for colonization.
I would bet that the difference in gravity isn't that big of a deal. If humans can weigh 3x more than normal here on Earth and survive then I would guess that we could weigh 1/3 normal and manage to scrape by.
I don't know. I think the technology to generate artificial gravity might be easier to develop than whatever would be needed to survive on Venus' inhospitable surface.
Maybe we ought to start thinking that here is where we belong and here is where we need to stay. Mars has no sustainable atmosphere and Venus has too much atmosphere, mostly acidic. But then we do find life in the ocean bottom subsisting on a Venus type atmosphere, of course we would have to be content with being worms. I wonder what religion they practice.
I remember simulating a flight to mars in equipment scrounged from an old barn turned storage shed back in the '60s. I also remember thinking that surely NASA could do better than recreating the fantasies of a ten year old.
About 500 billion for a trip to Mars using rockets. Forget about it. It will never happen. All this 18 months in a cocoon is nonsense and a waste of time and money The only possible way for anyone to get to Mars would be further development of the ion engines. Using a small nuclear reactor hooked to a more advanced ion engine would put us on Mars in weeks and not months. The cost would be next to nothing compared to using standard rockets. Of course, 500 billion would make lots of rocket engine companies big profits.
Actually, the projected cost for the "Mars Direct" mission architecture using a conventional heavy lift chemical booster for direct throw to Mars and in situ resource utilization for converting carbon dioxide in the Martian into methane-oxygen bi-propellant for the return trip works out to only $30 billion over ten years or about $3 billion per year, the same as the annual budget for the recently retired space shuttle operations in LEO. In contrast, the plan for using ion propulsion and a nuclear reactor to achieve an equally short transit to Mars for human expeditions has run into a possibly insurmountable problem of requiring a reactor so heavy that the cost projections for that method would rise astronomically off the chart.
AStronomically is the key word in your low ball estimates of a trip to Mars. The actual cost may be in the lives lost. All of the information and data that a manned space flight can hope to achieve could be done without risking one life. There is only one true purpose of a manned flight and that is for the glory of the men making the trip, one way or another dead or alive. We spent some twenty billion to bring back soil and rocks from the Moon only to discover that they were identical to soil and rocks we have right here on Earth. A Martian trip will learn the same thing. An unmanned flight would not require the elaborate life sustaining equipment and supplies and could be performed at a quarter of the cost. As far as determining whether there is or has been life on Mars, their is a good probability that some form of germs or virus' did or still do exist there. Life seems to be a byproduct of the universe or as some of our scientist tell us it can or could have been brought here on meteors along with our water.
Ion engines are as real as your imagination can make them, the Sun has been putting out and still does trillions upomn trillions of ions every second and it has not moved one millimeters distance from us in billions of years. The theory of the ion engine is that it gradually exerts a force against the vacuum of space and gradually inceases its speed over distance and time where it propels some object up to tremendous speeds. An ion engine would only increase the speed of a spaceship by less than one kilometer per hour on a trip from Earth to Mars if that. You've been reading too much science fiction. Yes Harry, there is no ion engine, it is akin to Solar Wind and any scientist wortth the paper his degree is printed on knows that Solar Wind won't move a proton molecule a nanometer of distance.
UFO's, Aliens, SETI, interstellar space travel and all other such dribble are all exercises of either someone selling a book, or story or complete exercises in futility. UFO's are just that, unidentified phenomena which in time will be explained by known phenomena. Insofar as aliens, they cannot be here because interstellar space travel is impossible. Any electronic signals coming from any other world would be masked by the radiation coming from that star system. No intelligent being would justify the energy to create a signal powerful enough to overcome the background radiation of his home star. Interstellar space travel is impossible because of the distances involved. We do not have the technology at present to provide the logistics for a 520 day trip to and from Mars, a scant fifty or so million miles away. Imagine a trip by any living being of nine thousand years which is the time it would take for us just to reach our nearest neighbor Alpha Centauri. Mr. Boyle and others who propose such ideas do not deal in real physical disciplines. There ideas are based on surrealistic velocities and undreamed of technologies to overcome the need of a viable living being in making such a trip. In going to Mars we must carry our atmosphere with us, we must carry sufficient food and water, we must carry sufficient fuel and energy and energy producing devices. Sunlight or star light, dimishes as a source of energy with distance. A spaceship two light years distance from our Sun could expect no or only the barest of energy resources to reach it. We receive no energy from AC, yet it has one and a half times our mass it is estimated. Belief in Alien beings is akin to religion, it is faith based and no amount of contradictory evidence can refute it to a believer. Mr. Boyle and others of his persuasion are the new prophets of this belief. No intelligen society would ever attempt interstellar space travel because it would be unproductive from any point of view as we will one day come to understand.
Jojo, maybe you have the dollars in your will, we could sure use some now, dollars that is. You sound like a man marooned on a life raft in the middle of the ocean who dreams of taking a cruise ship vacation. If they took that five hundred billion dollar cost of going to Mars and divided it up and gave it to every American citizen we could all be millionaires. Just think no more poverty, no more medical problems. I for one don't give a damn what's on Mars and I know that whatever they find there is not going to cure the common cold. You can go if you like but please use your own money and not my million dollars.
As my screen name implies, I am a huge fan of human spaceflight, "exploration" missions specifically. That being said, I see little reason for humans to go to Mars until new propulsion methods can reduce the trip duration. We have yet to learn how to live and work in deep space for more than a week... and that was 40 years ago. The moon is the gateway to the solar system. No huge gravity well to overcome. Once we have established moon bases with in-situ resource production, then we can consider Mars missions.
Unfortunately, we still lack the political and financial will to "explore" the moon. If we can't get back to the moon then simulated Mars missions are "flights of fancy" and frankly wasted resources. No government or coalition of governments is going to pay for a Mars Direct architecture. I admire Zubrin for his vision and enthusiasm but he is little more than a quixotic figure in an "age of austerity".
You dont have to convince me of all the benefits the technological developments that would come from a crash program to Mars. It would likely be as revolutionary to Earth technology as Apollo was. But it takes guts... yes guts... A quality politicians lack today. They can see no further than the next election and unless it means jobs in your district, space exploration is not embraced by the hacks in Washington or the other capitals of the world.
What he said.........!
Ditto. Didn't moon bases used to be on the long term schedule of NASA? Wasn't it GW Bush that talked about it?