TEKNIK ELEKTRONIKA

Mars500 participants Romain Charles, Yue Wan, Diego Urbina, and Aleksandr Smoleevskiy prepare an electroencephalogram (EEG) recording as part of their medical record-keeping.
(Credit:ESA)
A little over a year ago, six men emerged from an isolation facility at Russia's Institute for Biomedical Problems, apparently none the worse for their 105 days locked together in close quarters.
In fact, they were relentlessly chirpy throughout the three-and-a-half-month sequestration, in spite of square footage that was probably less than that of your first apartment out of college, where you probably had fewer roommates. And many more windows.
But that was just the warm-up act. In early June, another sextet of 20- and 30-something males ducked their heads through soon-to-be-sealed hatches in the Moscow facility for the main attraction in the Mars500 project: a simulation exercise of a full-length trip to Mars and back that will last 520 days, or about 17 months. Alexey, Diego, Romain, and the three others will next see the natural light of day on November 6, 2011.
(To date, by the way, the longest continuous stay in space is 437 days, from January 1994 to March 1995, a record held by cosmonaut and longtime Mir space station occupant Valeri Polyakov.)
Coincidentally, November 2011 is when NASA will be launching its next rover to Mars, acar-sized and nuclear-powered robotic vehicle called Curiosity. Its mission, expected to last roughly two Earth years, is to dig deeper and drive further than earlier rovers in pursuit of clues about whether the Red Planet was ever capable of supporting life.
Meanwhile, NASA is gearing up for eventual manned missions to Mars (and back to the moon) not in a series of closed tubes, but in the wide-open spaces of the Canadian Arctic, at a "Mars analog" location called Haughton Crater. "No place on Earth is truly like Mars," cautions the About page of the Haughton-Mars Project, run by the nonprofit Mars Institute. But it may be as close as we can get--plus, the travel costs certainly aren't nearly as daunting, you're not likely to be away from home for a year and a half, and you can practice traipsing over big rocks in a spacesuit.
"The rocky polar desert setting, geologic features, and biological attributes of the site offer unique insights into the possible evolution of Mars--in particular the history of water and of past climates on Mars--the effects of impacts on Earth and on other planets, and the possibilities and limits of life in extreme environments," according to the HMP site.


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