Six volunteers Friday will emerge blinking into the outside world after spending almost one-and-a-half-years in isolation at a Russian research centre to test the effects on humans of a flight to Mars.
The six men, who have spent 520 days in a capsule in a car park outside the Moscow institute, will at 1000 GMT open the hatch of their module that slammed shut on June 3, 2010, before being taken for a barrage of medical tests.
The experiment simulated blast off in June last year and landing on Mars in February, with volunteers carrying out spacewalks in full space gear in a sand-filled enclosure before setting off on the long journey back to Earth.
The all-male team is made up of three Russians, two doctors and one engineer; a Chinese astronaut trainer; and French and Italian engineers, who were sent by the European Space Agency.
"Spending 520 days with people from different groups, different nationalities, different mentalities is not simple at all. They have behaved very worthily," said Mark Belakovsky, the project's deputy director,
The project has prompted some ridicule for its earth-bound nature, without the weightlessness of a real flight. But the organisers have strictly followed real rules of space travel -- even down to a 20-minute delay in communications.
And the space agencies that are partners in the Mars 500 project have said it played an important role proving that people would be able to endure the solitude and frustration of a long-haul flight to Mars and back.
