Europe Seeks Mars Test Volunteers

Wanted: 12 people to live in a mock-up 'spacecraft' for 500 days
By Dustin Lushing,  Newser Staff
Posted Jun 20, 2007 5:31 PM CDT
Europe Seeks Mars Test Volunteers
This artist rendering released by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, shows the Mars Global Surveyor in orbit around Mars. According to a preliminary report released Friday, April 13, 2007, human error triggered a cascade of events that caused the battery to fail on the Mars Global Surveyor last year....   (Associated Press)

The European Space Agency is recruiting 12 volunteers to spend 17 months living and working in a series of interconnected modules that simulate an inter-planetary mission to Mars. The 'spaceship' is 19,250 cubic feet and is located at the Russian Institute for Biomedical Problems in Moscow.

Researchers want to study the type of behavior and group dynamics that arise in an environment similar to that of a mission to the Red Planet; the trip would take at least 250 days just to get there. Applicants for the test must be between 25 and 50, up to 6'1 in height, and in good health. Already nearly 150 Europeans have applied. (More Mars stories.)

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