Tag: Institute for Biomedical Problems

Mars500: Earth approaching!

Diego Urbina gets philosophical in his most recent diary from the Mars500 modules, just shy of 520 days in isolation. From Sasha’s birthday to the importance of the arts on space missions, Diego covers both with a skillful drawing and touching text.

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13 October 2011.

It’s early morning in the spaceship modules. Of course, there is no way to tell it is morning except by the sounds of the other guys’ blood pressure machines making that noise: ‘Brrrrrrr’. The pressure is read aloud by a female voice in the machine, telling you how healthy you are. Blood pressure can go up with stress, salt consumption and many other kinds of things. No stress today: it’s almost day 500 out of 520, and if your blood pressure or heart rate is exceptionally high, it’s surely not stress: it would have to be your heart keen to land on Earth.

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The Mars500 crew is only two months from their ‘arrival’ back on Earth and they can’t wait to see the sunlight. To prepare for that and to understand more about how the human brain reacts to variations of day and night and adjusts the sleep-wake cycle, the marsonauts are wearing red glasses andilluminating their modules with blue light. Diego explains about the photopigments in our eyes and and shows how the experiment is done. After all, life inside the Mars500 ‘spacecraft’ is all about the science!

ESA PR — 3 June 2011 — The six men in the Mars500 facility near Moscow have been in isolation now 365 days. The European crewmembers have been writing in their latest letters home about the highlights, monotonous life, team spirit and determination to go on.

“Wow, it’s already been a year,” begins Diego Urbina, one of the two Mars500 crewmembers from ESA, in his latest diary entry.

“One way to visualise it is if you think of what you were doing exactly one year ago, and then picture yourself living in a windowless metal box from then!”

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The Mars500 crew tends to its greenhouse while on the return leg of its simulated trip to the Red Planet.

The highlight of the Mars500 was landing to Mars. Diego and Romain are showing in this long video all what happened during exiting February at the Mars500 modules.

The Mars500 crew arrived virtually at Mars on 1 February and – as the mission description goes – docked there with a lander, found it full of cargo and transferred it to their spacecraft. After careful preparations three crewmembers (Diego Urbina, Alexandr Smoleevskiy and Wang Yue) entered the lander on 8 February and they ‘landed’ on Mars. Romain Charles, Alexey Sitev and Sukhrob Kamolov continued to ‘orbit’ Mars and followed their friends as they made three ‘Marswalks’, then rejoined them on 27 February after ‘docking’ with the orbital vehicle.

This video is a compilation of the material they recorded during this key period of the Mars500 isolation study.

Now that the Mars500 crew has been united, when the Marswalkers, ‘returned’ from the surface of the Red Planet to join the ‘orbital’ trio, Diego Urbina has again had time to send his thoughts. This diary was written on 21 February, before the last egress to the simulated martian surface.

The last few weeks have been truly exciting. As you probably know, Wang, Aleksandr and I, transferred to the landing module, have been living in further isolation, in a reduced room (about 50 cubic metres) for a couple of weeks, in order to represent the landing on Mars.

In spite of it not being the real Red Planet, it did mean so much in our ‘microcosmos’ that I think that even if it wasn’t exactly the same emotion someone would feel on Mars, it did come quite close, at least for me.

After transferring, we initiated the operations that a crew would need to do on Mars. We used a software called ‘Virtu’ that simulates several environments and situations. One of the scenarios was this: imagine a pressurized rover that we had to drive from our base to the (purposely hidden and difficult to reach) landing place of a probe that had been sent to Mars before the manned mission. It was quite tricky, especially when coming back to the base, when a sandstorm and drained batteries made our road tougher.

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Mars 500 Diary: Unpacking the Lander and preparing for a hike on Mars
by Romain Charles
9 February 2011

In the latest diary Romain writes about opening the hatches to the cargo-filled Lander, emptying it and preparing for the big event: ‘landing’ on Mars and going out for a walk!

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