A 520-day attempt to simulate an entire mission to Mars has hit a major milestone, “arriving” in mock orbit around a mock Red Planet after months of virtual interplanetary flight.
The Mars500 mission “spacecraft” — actually a collection of sealed habitats in Moscow — entered a simulated orbit phase around the Red Planet on Tuesday (Feb. 1), according to the European Space Agency. Three of the craft’s six crewmembers, all of whom are volunteers, will “land” on Mars on Feb. 12 to make three deployments onto simulated Martian terrain, ESA officials said.
Mars500 — a $15 million joint experiment by ESA, Russia and China — aims to study the complex psychological and technical challenges that must be solved for long spaceflights, officials have said. The project has been running for more than eight months in a mock spacecraft at the Institute of Biomedical Problems in Moscow.

A manned mission to Mars would be the greatest adventure in the history of the human race. And one man knows how to make it a reality. In fact, he just wrote the book on it — literally.
Joel Levine, senior research scientist with NASA’s Langley Research Center and co-chair of NASA’s Human Exploration of Mars Science Analysis Group, just published “The Human Mission to Mars: Colonizing the Red Planet.” The book reads like a who’s who of Mars mission science, featuring senators, astronauts, astrophysicists, geologists and more on getting to Mars, studying its atmosphere and climate, the psychological and medical effects on the crew and other details.
There’s even a section detailing the science of sex on Mars, should NASA attempt to create a permanent colony there.

President Bush wants to send Americans back to the moon