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Russian Mock Mars Mission
sdriver writes "CNN reports that Russia is attempting a 500-day mock Mars mission. The article goes on to say, "six volunteers will depend on a preset limit of supplies, including about 5 tons of food and oxygen and 3 tons of water." Also, "Experiment participation is not solely reserved for Russian volunteers, institute officials added."
Mars comes to cosmonauts!
(Sorry, I had to.)
Well, if the US mocked the moon landing, I suppose it's time for the russians for their share of airtime!!!
Life isn't like a box of chocolates. It's more like a jar of jalapenos. What you do today, might burn your ass tomorrow.
six volunteers will depend on a preset limit of supplies, including about 5 tons of food and oxygen and 3 tons of water
But how is that any different from regular russia?
This is the true story of six volunteers, picked to live inside a capsule and have their lives taped to find out what happens when people stop being polite, and start being real. The Real Mars.
oops I mean, no I didn't see that, nobody saw that movie
better to find out now the likelihood of cosmonauts going nuts and killing each other when crammed in a tin for 500 days, than in the black depths of space.
This comment is fully compliant with RFC 527.
Will this be a true test of human survial though?
Since volunteers is allowed to quit the experiment if they develop a severe ailment or psychological stress, most likely they won't try hard enough to survive the journey.
However in real life-and-death situation, people tend to do amazing things just to stay alive.
Uselessful technology (Air-Charged
I read this as "Russian mocks Mars mission" and pictured Alexander Putin dancing around a table making fun a NASA scientist.
"Oh yes, we land on Mars, yes, aren't we clever? I'm so clever with my MIT degree, I'm a clever little scientist. Those Americans think they're so smart with their advanced rocketry. It makes me so mad. Get me a vodka, Yuri."
That happened maybe five years ago. Don't know what the duration was, though. I'm pretty sure it was only a few months.
/.'ers every day life: no women, stuck in a tiny room in front of a computer screen, food in granola bar form (Oblig. Simpsons: "if you put food in bar form, you unleash it's awesome power"), no social contact, etc.
They could probably fund this by doing a reality TV show, heh. And if you RTFA, they say that no women will be allowed to volunteer - so it'll probably be just like a
In addition to the limited supplies of food, air, and water, I would think the experiment would want to mimic the other deprivations the crew might experience on the way to and from Mars. Most notably, I'd think, they'd want to emulate the lengthening communications lag between Mission Control and the "ship". Start with the sort of glitch experienced in orbit, and drag it out to the full 6-10 minutes.
Also, you'd want to make the communication link have a realistic bandwidth. Whatever is the state of the art at "launch" is what they're stuck with for the duration of the trip.
Now, if this were an episode of "Survivor: Mars", you'd throw in a monkey wrench... maybe a Galileo-style communications system error, where their phat pipe gets cut down to 300 baud, and the men fight over which supermodel pr0n picture to download each week.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
make it 3 tons of Vodka and I'll go.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
I recall reading sometime ago that US Navy studies for crewing submarines showed women coped much better will prolonged living in confined quarters than men do and an all female submarine crew would probably have higher moral than an all male crew.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
So while we're all reading dupes, he'll still be just getting the originals.
I'd rather be lucky than good.
Ah man, this story brings back good memories for me.
When I was about, oooh 14 years old or so, I went to a "Space and Science Camp" one summer. We did all sorts of crazy stuff related to space. My favorite was trying to design "crash modules" to protect an egg from a two story drop (that was hella fun).
Anyways, one of the special activities we did was a mock Moon base mission. Basically we spent one day cutting black garbage bags open and duct taping them together into a series of domes and tunnels for our "base". It had two openings: one was a sealable flap (our "airlock") and the other was an open hole that they put a big fan in to inflate the entire structure (worked really well too). Oh and some small ventillation holes in each room. Anyways, the next day we went on our "mission", which was basically a dozen or more of us stuck inside this inflated garbage bag, in the middle of a gymnasium with the lights turned off. We were divided up into teams and everyone given certain tasks. I was a communications officer, which basically ment I got to sit there and communicate with "earth" (our supervisors) on an old macintosh. We were also responsible for general coordination of the base. Another team was our Medical branch. They had some generic tests/experiments to try while we were 'on the moon', in addition to being responsible for the health of the entire staff. Theirs was actually the only 'serious' mission, because they had to test everyone regularly for signs of CO2 poisioning while we were effectively trapped inside a plastic bag for six hours straight. We also had an exploration team that got to do "moonwalks", which was basically tying a rope around one guy, blindfolding him, and shoving him out into the gymnasium to see what he could find. They came in very important (more later). The only other team I remember was our "Engineering" team, who was responsible for maintaining the base's structure, armed with nothing but some spare garbage bags, some knives, and enough duct tape to wrap an army. They even got around to making a couple of small additions to the base. Those guys had lots of fun.
The cool thing about our "mission" was, in addition to trying to complete the tasks given to us by Earth base, our supervisors fucked with us at every possible opportunity. They did shit like "solar activity disrupting communications" (disconnected our Mac from the LAN) so we were on our own for an hour. They walked around with knives and poked holes in the bags to keep the engineering team busy... VERY busy. When we were done, our base looked like someone had taken a piece of swiss cheese and put tape over all the holes. They were cruel. About 20 minutes after our engineering team completed a tunnel connecting medical to communications, I hear this slicing sound and feel air rushing past my face. I turn around, and the bastards had cut a three foot gap in the new tunnel! Engineering runs over and starts trying to tape it up, but its not gonna be airtight... so the creative bastards rip off their paper medical jumpsuits (we even had mission stickers, names, rank, etc on them) and use them to seal off the tunnel. Heh that was cool. Even cooler though, was when the "alien" got into our base through the same gap. One of the engineering guys opened up the tunnel to see about further repairs, and he finds the supervisors have slashed it (AGAIN!) and dumped a plastic turtle in the gap as an "alien". The whole base erupts in panic. Engineering shows up in force as they're the only ones with knives. Medical runs in and tries to start bossing people around because "this is a biological matter". It was hillarious. We eventually figured out (with Earth's help) that the alien was dead, and medical got the goahead to start an autopsy on it. Very cool.
By far the most exciting event in the mission was our "catastrophic power failure". Everyone's working allong happilly... computers chirping, people talking, fans humming... and then no humming. People kind of looked around at eachother real slowly like "Uhh, wa
...to what long duration voyage submariners go through. 500 days is a long time though, I don't think any totally submerged and all sealed up submarine voyage has lasted that long, I think something like 6 weeks is more normal.(could be wrong on that, any knowledgeable folks please correct me) I am sure there are tons of scientific studies already about the physiological and psychological impacts of long term close quarters living, where you can't just "get out" and all your existence is self contained, more or less. The subs though can make their own fresh water and O2, so that makes it easier in many ways. Also no weightlessness to contend with. But....similar.
Hmm, sorta like jail, too, in a way.
Yes this does appear to sound quite funny, but I think that this is very doable, without much of a health risk at all to the astronauts.
..........FULL STOP.
Food, other consumables, oxygen, water, yes, these are valid simulations. I'd also like to see what the options are for running a hydroponics lab to oxygenate the air and cleanse sewer waste, though not to eat necessarily since this would involve a fair amount of work.
I'd thought about the air and water recycling problem when running a different thought experiment (was planning what amounted to a single-person spacecraft with a 1-2 week nominal mission duration capacity).
It turns out that if you're only going out for a couple of weeks, or if you have a significant mass budget, recycling isn't important at all. The mass of food consumed is surprisingly low, and we have plenty of experience keeping it light and compact (think "MRE"s; the military has a vested interest in food that keeps and is easy to transport). Oxygen consumed will at most be enough to burn that food - the part of that food that's not already oxidized (water-based). Water consumption is relatively low - a couple of litres per day for a comfortable allocation. So you have a few pounds of supplies used per day, and can easily store a year or more's supplies without the supplies outweighing the rest of your expedition's equipment.
For recycling, air and water are the most important. Water because you go through a significant amount of it, but it's still fairly easy to recycle, and air because you go through a _lot_ of it (2-3 times the dry weight of your food). Both of these turn out to be easy to do if you have _power_. Brute force chemical processes and (for water) techniques like distillation come to the rescue. While 100% recycling of water is hard to do, even 80-90% would have a huge impact on your supply mass, and air recycling is very nearly perfect.
A biologically based recycler has the advantage of being able to turn solid waste into food, but that's about its only advantage. System efficiency vs. energy in (light) is actually pretty poor, and it takes a lot of space and a lot of mass, even if you use something like algae that's near the bottom of the food chain and has low infrastructure requirements.
Biological recyclers are useful when you can afford a large facility mass, and when you have a lot of people to feed. These are true on a large space station (think "colony") or planetary base (again think "colony"), but not for most spacecraft.
Still very interesting to think through the options for.