MARS 500 International Crew Selected

At the beginning of June, three Russian astronauts will be joined by Chinese, Italian and French colleagues on a simulated mission lasting 520 days sealed inside a simulated interplanetary spacecraft, the men will mimic the effects of traveling, researching and living in space for the duration of a year and a half while still on the ground in Moscow. The mission is a groundbreaking study that will show the stress put on astronauts during such lengthy missions, particularly a potential journey to Mars.

A commission of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Medical and Biological Problems last Tuesday named the crew. “There are four Russian citizens – two doctors, Sukhrob Kamolov and Alexander Smoleyevsky, and two engineers, Alexei Sityov and Mikhail Sinelnikov, two European engineers – Romain Charles of France and Diego Urbina of Italy, and China’s Wan Yue on the crew,” experiment director Boris Morukov said.

A Russian will be the crew commander. Another two crewmembers will become the flight engineer and the doctor. Three will be researchers. Each function must be duplicated because the experiment will be rather complicated. The three researchers will ‘land’ on the Martian surface.

English and Russian will be the working languages, but three researchers from Europe and China do not speak Russian. “A special sign language has been agreed upon for avoiding possible misunderstandings,” Morukov said. The Russian Energia Aerospace Corporation developed the flight plan.

More from ITN News and BBC reports.