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KOROLYOV, country – After 257 life in a locked steel capsule, researchers on a handle activate to Mars ventured from their cramped lodging weekday in heavy expanse suits, trudging into a sand-covered room to existence flags on a simulated Red Planet.

The gathering of threesome Russians, a Frenchman, an Italian-Colombian and a Chinese entered a meshwork of modules at a Moscow research edifice terminal June to reproduce the 520-day grace and see how they cope with the constricted, isolating conditions of expanse movement — minus the weightlessness.

Several participants donned 30-kilogram (66-pound) suits to perform Monday's handle landing in an adjacent capsule. They naturalised the flags of Russia, China and the dweller Space Agency, took "samples" from the connector and conducted faux scientific experiments.

"All systems hit been working normally. The gathering are feeling fine," said Vitaly Davydov, help head of the Slavonic expanse agency.

Psychologists said daylong confinement would put the aggroup members under pronounce as they grow increasingly tired of apiece other's company. Psychological conditions can even be more hard on a handle assignment than a actualised grace because the gathering won't undergo whatever of the euphoria or dangers of actualised expanse travel.

Davydov described the research as an important conception of preparation for grace to Mars and predicted that the actualised assignment could verify place in about 20 years, but only with international cooperation.

Martin Zell, a dweller Space Agency authorised overseeing the experiment, called the assignment a "really brawny quality for forthcoming undertakings of mankind in space, for its ambition to control finally to the Red Planet."

The artefact for the research is in western Moscow and includes experience compartments the filler of a bus connected with individualist other modules for experiments and exercise. The video footage of the landing was shown on a bounteous concealment at Russia's Mission Control Center in Korolyov right Moscow, which is used to handle manned missions to the international expanse stations.

The assignment director has said the research could be disrupted for medical or technical reasons, or if whatever of the participants obligation it be stopped.

So farther the gathering has been doing just fine. "After a pair of weeks they were rattling a team, sure with whatever temporary ups and downs of individualist crewmembers," Zell told The Associated Press.

"A bounteous contest is absent daylight, absent seeable perceptions," he said. "They also hit to live with the matter which they hit on commission and with the expose which they hit on board."

The crewmen communicate with the organizers and their families via the Internet — suspended and occasionally disrupted to reproduce the personalty of expanse travel. They take canned matter kindred to that currently offered on the International Space Station.

A kindred research in 1999-2000 at the same Moscow create went lopsided when a river woman complained of existence forcibly kissed by a Slavonic aggroup captain. She also said digit Slavonic gathering members had a mitt fisticuffs that mitt murder splattered on the walls. Slavonic officials downplayed the incidents, attributing them to cultural gaps and stress.

A actualised assignment to Mars is decades absent because of Brobdingnagian costs and massive technological challenges, particularly the task of creating a compact shield that will protect the gathering from noxious expanse radiation. President Barack Obama said terminal period that he foresaw sending astronauts to itinerary Mars by the mid-2030s.

The research is existence conducted by the Moscow-based Institute for Medical and Biological Problems in cooperation with the dweller Space Agency and China's expanse training center.

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