Astronauts Walk on "Mars," Start Experiments
Three members of Mars500 project explore a sandy room.
The explorers make up half the crew of the Mars500 mission, a project designed to study the psychological effects of a year-and-a-half long, deep-space voyage to the red planet.
(Related: "Astronauts Could Ride Asteroids to Mars, Study Says.")
Since June 2010 six men—three Russians, two Europeans, and one Chinese—have been living in isolation in a 19,423-cubic-foot (550-cubic-meter) "spaceship" outside Moscow, doing maintenance work, conducting experiments, and trying to stave off boredom by playing Rock Band and reading the complete works of Gabriel García Márquez.
The crew is made up of volunteers, some with no real-life space experience but all with applicable skills, such as engineering and medicine.
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