Locked away for 520 days

A MANNED mission to Mars may be decades away, but an international team of researchers yesterday began to try to experience what one might be like by locking themselves up in a windowless capsule for a year-and-half – the time needed for a round-trip to the red planet.

The all-male crew of three Russians, a Frenchman, an Italian-Colombian and a Chinese won’t endure weightlessness, but they will live for 520 days in the spartan conditions of a mock spaceship and follow a harsh regimen of experiments and exercise.

The main task of the Mars-500 experiment is to study the effects of long isolation to help a future space crew cope better with stress and fatigue.

A similar experiment in 1999-2000 went awry when a Canadian woman complained of being forcibly kissed by a Russian team captain and said that two Russian crew members had a fist fight that left blood splattered on the walls.