Mars-500

The Mars-500 mission was a psychosocial isolation experiment conducted between 2007 and 2011 by Russia, the European Space Agency and China, in preparation for an unspecified future manned spaceflight to the planet Mars. The experiment's facility was located at the Russian Academy of Sciences' Institute of Biomedical Problems (IBMP) in Moscow, Russia.

Between 2007 and 2011, three different crews of volunteers lived and worked in a mock-up spacecraft at IBMP. The final stage of the experiment, which was intended to simulate a 520-day manned mission, was conducted by an all-male crew consisting of three Russians (Alexey Sitev, Sukhrob Kamolov, Alexander Smoleevskij), a Frenchman (Romain Charles), an Italian (Diego Urbina) and a Chinese citizen (Yue Wang). The mock-up facility simulated an Earth-Mars shuttle spacecraft, an ascent-descent craft, and the Martian surface. The volunteers who participated in the three stages included professionals with experience in engineering, medicine, biology, and human spaceflight. The experiment yielded important data on the physiological, social and psychological effects of long-term close-quarters isolation.

The experiment was intended to yield valuable psychological and medical data on the effects of the planned long-term deep space mission. The experiment permitted the study of the technical challenges, work capability of crew and management of long-distance spaceflight. Communications lag, autonomy, resource rationing, health, conditions of isolation and hermetically closed, confined environment are the main peculiarities of the martian flight.

The experiment was designed to allow planning the methods and means of control and monitoring of the habitat during lengthy crew stays in confined and cramped conditions. Planning diagnostic, forecast and treatment of medical support and prophylaxis, the use of telemedicine technologies, countermeasures against adverse effect of the "flight" factors on the human body, psychological support, and the creation of a reporting system for activity of the crew and electronic transfer of information. Methods of psychological support and approbation, using the sociomapping method.

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