Letters from a Mars mission - sort of

IMAGINE BEING enclosed in a small space with five other people. Now imagine being there for a year.

Last week six volunteers aboard a simulated round-trip to Mars passed their anniversary of being in the “spacecraft”, which is really a series of interconnected modules in Moscow.

The six men (pictured) on the Mars 500 mission started their 520-day “motionless trip” on June 3rd, 2010, and they have been busy carrying out onboard experiments, as well as simulating a landing on the surface of Mars back in February.

One of the principle aims of the isolation project is to see how humans interact in this kind of situation, and crew member Diego Urbina has been writing about the psychological aspects in a letter posted on the European Space Agency website.

“Keeping steady is not simple; we as individuals have ups and downs and our mood may fluctuate, but as a group we keep level, moving forward like a flock of birds,” he writes. “And like a flock of birds that must look for the ascending thermal currents that keep them flying high, once one of us picks up energy and height, the whole flock knows ‘where the thermal is’, and all of us go up.”

Meanwhile, fellow crew member Romaine Charles is upbeat about where the simulated trip has taken the participants. “The real highlight of our 365 days was definitively Mars. The Red Planet was our target from the start and reaching it was a great moment,” he writes. “We have a great crew and although our backgrounds are significantly different, we never had any conflicts. That’s why I’m full of optimism for our last days in the Mars 500 modules. We’ll see you on 5 November when we’ll land on Earth after our 520 days journey to the Red Planet, not before!”