MARS-500

MARS-500 was a psychosocial isolation experiment run between 2007 and 2011 by Russia, the European Space Agency and China as preparation for a possible future crewed flight to Mars. It was hosted at the Institute of Biomedical Problems of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow, where three successive crews of volunteers lived and worked inside a ground-based mock-up spacecraft. The facility simulated an Earth to Mars shuttle, an ascent and descent craft and the Martian surface. The final and longest stage was designed to simulate a 520 day crewed mission and was carried out by an all-male crew of three Russians, a Frenchman, an Italian and a Chinese citizen. The volunteers included people with backgrounds in engineering, medicine, biology and human spaceflight, and the experiment produced data on the physiological, social and psychological effects of long-term confinement in close quarters. No spacecraft was launched; it is a ground simulation, not a flight.