Imagine that you are flying to Mars. Fly without any scientific and unscientific fantastic tricks, without all these hyperpresident, subspaces, teleports and without diving into suspended animation. That is day by day you see the sun becomes darker, and the connection with the Earth is getting worse. You are locked in a confined space with several companions in flight, and your life monotonous. What will happen to your body and mind to the end of the journey?

Module "Mars-500", inside view (photo europeanspaceagency.)

Mission to Mars would take now about 520 days, including the way back. The record for the stay in extraterrestrial space delivered cosmonaut Valery Polyakov, who has lived on the station Mir 437 days. Although he suffered this orbital watch without problems, after his return remained a number of issues concerning how the human body can cope with, for example, lack of natural sunlight. To answer them, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania (USA) appealed for help to the colleagues from the Russian Institute of biomedical problems of RAS and held together with them half a study using module simulator program "Mars-500".

In the experiment, six people 27-38 years - "the crew of the ship" - lived 520 days in a narrow chambers test module, kopirovanija space ship. They could communicate with the outside world, but with such a delay, which simulates communication problems between the spacecraft and Earth. At that, "astronauts" even had the opportunity to work on pseudonarcissus surface in a specially equipped room, before heading to the "return path". All activities of people within the module was recorded on video, with special attention was paid to how often experimental sleep and how much time they spend doing nothing.

In an article published in the journal PNAS, the study authors report that the crew became sedentary, they are less moving as if in a dream, and during wakefulness. Waking up, the man tried to fill your time with something that did not require much physical activity, i.e. reading, watching movies or video games. And what became less active members of the crew, the longer they remained in shaded areas of the module. By the end of the "flight" of the three of them slept for an hour longer than before. Of course, this people have lost the desire to engage in complex mental work - for example, to learn a foreign language. After completion of the experiment participants took at least 20 days to return your activity on dopolneny level.

In other words, the long interplanetary flight turns man into a bummer that most of the time in front of the TV. On Earth to live, but on the ship laziness completely inappropriate. The same explanation is that the conditions of the spacecraft (in this case - mimicking module) distant from the earth, and in particular this applies to light. All participants of the experiment were upset cycle of sleep and wakefulness, and one of them has he ever was replaced with a 24-hour 25 hours. This, of course, could not but affect the status of the organism and psyche. Perhaps if the maximum zoom habitat in the ship to earth - for example, increase the dose of blue light in the coverage of these problems can be avoided. There are, of course, is another option, which, however, is unlikely to be realized in the near future: to turn fiction into reality and create this engine, which will allow to make space flights so quickly that the astronauts will simply not be able to Obinitsa.

Based on the materials of the University of Pennsylvania.