Volunteers Wanted For Simulated 520-Day Mars Trip

anglico writes 'Starting in 2010, an international crew of six will simulate a 520-day round-trip to Mars, including a 30-day stay on the martian surface. In reality, they will live and work in a sealed facility in Moscow, Russia, to investigate the psychological and medical aspects of a long-duration space mission. ESA is looking for European volunteers to take part.'

Comments

This is not new

[Ceiynt]

See: Biodome. The failed movie or the failed experiment.

Re:This is not new

[wizardforce]

An experiment is only a failure if you don't learn anything from it.

Re:Let them play WOW

[icebrain]

It's kinda hard to play real-time interactive games when you're dealing with round-trip signal times of up to 40 minutes... I think that would knock out MMO games. Now something like split-screen Halo, on the other hand, doesn't require that, but is more likely to forment anger amongst the crew.

On the gripping hand, the old naval solution would probably work best. That is, keep the crew occupied with enough busywork that they don't have time to piss each other off. This was the standard practice on old sailing men of war; you needed large crews for combat/damage repair and for certain shipkeeping tasks, but otherwise they sat around with little to do. Hence, rituals of inspection, holystoning the deck, etc. This is also why modern crew-reduction initiatives on ships can backfire; smaller crews have a harder time performing damage control than larger ones.

Anyways, for a Mars mission you need a lot of crew for the surface exploration in order to get as much data as possible; the cruise phases (for the most part) have little for them to do. They'd likely be occoupied running different experiments and performing regular maintenance, and exercising (a lot) rather than just being couch kudzu.