It is clear how much speed and range the technologies we use in space travel give us. Although we send instruments to the planets in the Solar System for examination, we are not going there yet with manned missions. It is out of the question for an astronaut to use a sentence like “I’ll stop by Mars in 2 minutes” while returning from a mission. But we better get used to this concept when that is possible someday.
A crew on the International Space Station (ISS) will undergo a test to prepare for such spontaneous situations in the future. Returning from orbit to Earth, the crew will land anywhere on Earth and stay there for a few days, as if landing on another planet.
They will camp without help
Oleg Kotov, Deputy Director of the Institute of Medical and Biological Problems of the Russian Academy of Sciences, announced in a recent press release that a crew that will return to Earth from the International Space Station will stay where they landed on Earth to test the application of landing on a different planet.
“The crew is scheduled to spend a day or two near the landing pod after its return to Earth,” Kotov said. In other words, rescue teams will not be sent there, but some equipment will be supplied as if they had landed on the surface of a planet,” he explained. A similar experiment was conducted in 2017 and lasted 17 days. In 2019, a four-month experiment was conducted between March and July. Thanks to these experiments, the things and deficiencies that astronauts may need in the Mars mission, where communication delays may occur, will be determined.
38725
