Article Posted on : - May 19, 2010

The experiment will be conducted inside a special facility at the IBMP in Moscow. ESA photo (S Corvaja)

NEW DELHI (BNS): Russia has selected the team for participation in a simulated mission to Mars.

The Russian crew includes engineers Alexei Sitev and Mikhail Sinelnikov, surgeon Sukhrob Kamolov and physiologist Alexander Smoleevsky, a report by Bloomberg said.

One of the four will serve as a replacement in case someone decides to quit, Bloomberg quoted Mark Belakovsky, deputy head of the Mars-500 project, as saying.

The Mars-500 project is partly funded by the European Space Agency. The Russians will be joined by Chinese cosmonaut trainer Wang Yue, Italian engineer Diego Urbina and French engineer Romain Charles.

The crew will enter a 1,750 square-meter (18,800-square-foot), five-module complex in June and live there in isolation for 17 months.

The astronauts will spend the first 250 days in a mock spaceship to replicate the amount of time it would take to reach Mars with current technology. After reaching the planet, three crewmembers will spend 30 days “exploring and colonizing” the planet before returning to the ship for the 240-day flight home.

The 520-day confinement is the culminating stage of a three-part project that was first proposed more than a decade ago. In 2007, a six-man crew spent two weeks in the complex and 105 days last year.

The results of the experiment will form a part of a 10-year funding plan for the space industry that Russia’s government is scheduled to approve in 2015, said Alexander Zheleznyakov, a Mars expert at the Russian Academy of Space Exploration in Moscow.