Virtual Mars mission – 500 days in a box.

The Chicago Tribune recently had a piece on Russia’s latest contribution to today’s space race. They’re prepping for a Mars flight by locking six people in a small space for 500 days, to test the psychological effects of a mission to the Red Planet:

“It’s your task to avoid nervous breakdowns,” said Haider Khobikhozhin, who took part in a nine-month simulated flight at the institute in 1999. “You force yourself to control your emotions. You stop yourself from wishing to see the sun.”

Khobikhozhin’s crew in the 1999 simulated flight included four Russians, a German, an Austrian, a Japanese man and a Canadian woman.

When the crew celebrated New Year’s Eve, one of the Russian men tried to kiss the Canadian woman, Khobikhozhin said.

The Russians chalked it up to revelry; the Canadian woman called it sexual harassment. To resolve the matter, the door handle to the Russian side of the hatch was removed to keep the Russian men from entering the woman’s module.

The crew also lost sense of the passage of time, said Khobikhozhin, 56, now an engineer at the institute.

“There’s no day or night,” he said. “So you’ve got to make calculations in your head as to how much time has passed, and this creates stress.”

They’re hoping to have a crew selected by 2009 – but they’ve been talking about it for quite some time, too.

2 Comments

  1. This seems to me like a bogus experiment. Or, if not bogus, I’m not sure if the results are relevant to the question at hand.

    Last week on NPR, I heard someone saying that water boarding wasn’t so bad and that American soldiers in command roles often volunteer to be water boarded as part of demonstrations. It can’t be torture if people volunteer, right?

    The difference is, of course, Lieutenant Joe, with whom you play poker on Thursday nights, isn’t going to let you die. You know that. No matter what discomfort you feel, you know Lt. Joe will keep you alive.

    This faux mission seems similar. You know you’re on the ground. You have gravity. You know the project leaders aren’t going to let you die, let alone let you die in the vast expanse of interstellar space. Yes, there will be challenges to spending 500 days in a 750-foot long tube on earth. Still, it ain’t the same as spending it in space on a mission. Being the first person to set foot on Mars is a powerful antidote to crazy.

    Finally, I wonder if the prison system might be another way to research long terms in confinement? How does 500 days in a 750-foot tube compare to 30 years in a 9×12 cell with a well-hung associate who has ‘bad dog’ tattooed across his chest?

  2. Yeah, it is a strange experiment – I think prison wouldn’t work as a substitute, though, because… well, that long a stretch in solitary (not leaving a cell, not seeing the sky) would be remarkable, and doing with other people in the cell would be even more remarkable.

    The article does point to BioSphere II as a better model for this kind of confinement.

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