After spending nearly a year-and-a-half isolated from the rest of the world on a simulated mission to Mars, six volunteer astronauts are set to “return” home to Earth this week.
The hatch of the spacecraft, which is really an isolation facility housed at the Russian Institute for Biomedical Problems in Moscow, will be opened on Nov. 4 for the first time since June 2010, when the six-person crew embarked on their mock 520-day journey to the Red Planet and back.