The news arrived earlier this month but it seems it reached the media just now: the Mars500 expedition organized by the Institute of Biomedical Problems (IBMP) in Moscow with the participation of ESA (European Space Agency) to simulate an expedition to Mars has virtually reached the red planet and it’s preparing for the landing.

An international team of virtual astronauts entered the module that simulates the spacecraft on June, 3 2010 and since then they’re hermetically isolated from the rest of the world to try to replicate at best the situation of a real space mission. Crew members follow a routine of maintenance, tests and daily exercises just as if they were real astronauts to try to study in the most authentic possible way their behavior during such a long mission.

Next week they’re beginning the simulation of the Mars landing with Russian Alexandr Smoleevskiy, Italo-Colombian Diego Urbina and Chinese Wang Yue who will be physically on the simulated Martian surface near the module Mars500 while their colleagues, French Romain Charles and Russians Sukhrob Kamolov and Alexey Sitev, who will remain in the module.

During the months two more virtual landings are planned and in early March the crew should start the virtual journey back with the arrival home scheduled for November.

Mars500 is the latest in a series of experiments carried out around the world where a group of people lives in isolation for long periods. In this case it’s the simulation of a trip to Mars and back, which is designed to assess the possible technical problems but also the psychological ones that real astronauts are likely to face in the future.

It’s obvious that even the best simulation of a journey to Mars we can create today can’t fully reproduce the conditions of a real journey starting with the gravity astronauts will face. The idea is that information obtained from this simulation will be put together with everything we already know about real space travel and long stays in space.

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Obviously if during the simulation a serious accident should happen or a virtual astronaut should have a serious health problem they can always intervene and stop it while in a real journey to Mars astronauts will be on their own to face all the risks. From a sychologically point the simulation isn’t perfect but other isolation experiments have shown that even if physically other people aren’t very far the psychology of people living isolated is influenced by their situation.

Let’s prepare for the virtual landing on Mars that’s about to occur, to boldly go where no simulation has gone before.