Pseudo-trip to Mars ends after 3 months

MOSCOW — After months sealed in an isolation chamber, participants in a simulated mission to Mars emerged Tuesday, completing what international scientists hope is a small step toward a manned mission to the red planet.

Four Russians, a German soldier and a French airline pilot spent 105 days locked in a series of hermetically sealed tubes as part of the Mars-500 project at the Institute of Biomedical Problems.

An actual manned mission, if one occurs, could be decades off, but Russian scientists and officials said the Mars-500 project, which will culminate in a 520-day isolation experiment scheduled to begin next year, was an indication of Russia's revitalized role in space exploration after years of struggling to keep a foothold in orbit.

"At this time we are moving from the era of preserving Russia's place in space to its advancement," said Vitaly Davydov, deputy chief of the Russian Federal Space Agency. "This is a promising project that will guarantee the orbital deployment of equipment that will fly to the moon and Mars."

The Mars-500 crew conducted about 70 experiments, testing their psychological and physical reactions to long-term isolation similar to that expected during interplanetary space travel.

Participants had no television or Internet, and their only links to the outside world were communications with the experiment's controllers — who also monitored them via TV cameras — and an internal e-mail system. Communications with the outside world had 20-minute delays to imitate a real spaceflight.

The international team of scientists drawn from Europe and the United States is seeking ways to avoid the mental breakdowns or worse that could result from such prolonged monotony.

Sergei Ryazansky, captain of the six-man crew, said the most difficult thing was knowing that, instead of making the 172 million-mile journey, the crew was locked in a four-piece windowless module made of metal canisters the size of railway cars.

Other crew members said tensions were unavoidable, although no major conflicts occurred.

Project organizers, meanwhile, declared the mission an overall success, but said detailed results from the experiment would be available only after weeks of analysis.

"The results of this experiment show that the basic principles on which we based this experiment were proven correct," said Boris Morukov, the experiment's director and a former crew member on the international space station.