As it turns out, one needn’t travel to the endless darkness of Antarctica in order to carry out a space analog study on isolation. In fact, the longest running isolation study took place in a warehouse in the middle of the 8th largest city in the world. For 520 days, six test subjects from Russia, France, Italy, and China were locked in a module in Moscow to test the effects of isolation on small group dynamics and individual psychology. [...]
Diego Urbina, an engineer from Italy, was one of these finalists, and on June 3, 2010, he was locked in the Russian module with five other crew members. They would have little contact with the outside world, with the exception of placing urine and blood samples through a hatch in the front door for the mission directors. For the first and last month of the simulation, the crew was allotted radio contact with mission control and video messages, which became subject to increasing delay as the crew “approached” Mars.
Outside of that, there was no internet, no phone calls, and a twice-a-day file upload that could be forwarded by mission support to the participants’ families. [...]
Perhaps one of the most successful aspects of the simulation were a number of dietary experiments sponsored by Erlangen University. Producing accurate results from experiments which involve manipulating subjects’ diets is often very difficult as it usually requires weeks of monitoring eating habits and extensive follow-up testing, which can mean that the data derived from these experiments is often unreliable. This is where Mars500 participants were able to offer some solutions: their inability to leave the module provided a perfect sample group for monitoring the effects of dietary manipulation.
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