The recent global COVID-19 pandemic has made almost all of us aware of the stress that comes with living in the same close quarters with a single group of people for a long time. So you can probably imagine the situation of the six men and women who participated in the SIRIUS-23 project of the Russian Academy of Sciences last Tuesday and will not go outside for 360 days.
The six-person team consists of crew commander Yuri Sergeevich Chebotarev, flight engineer Anzhelika Anatolyevna Parfyonova, crew doctor Ksenia Dmitrievna Orlova and researchers Olga Sergeevna Mastitskaya, Ksenia Sergeevna Shishenina and Rustam Nazimovich Zaripov. These six people will spend the next year in a closed facility of the Institute of Biomedical Problems (IBMP) near Moscow.
This is the fourth mission launched in the SIRIUS project, which stands for “Scientific International Research on Unique Terrestrial Station,” a joint effort between NASA and IBMPve. As in previous experiments, the crew will be on a nominally simulated Moon mission, performing close flybys, performing multiple “landings” and surface operations, and using a rover for research.
But while these simulations are interesting, they are not the main purpose of the mission. NASA announced at the launch of the SIRIUS-18/19 missions in 2019 that “The probe is not about exploring the lunar surface.” Instead, the agency explained, these are “a series of missions to better understand how the human body and mind adapt to increasing durations of spaceflight missions with crews representing different countries and cultures.”
However, this stated purpose is also the main reason why this most recently launched mission is quite unusual, because this time NASA is not involved in the work. “The agency is not participating in the 12-month SIRIUS 23 mission,” Anna Schneider, public affairs specialist at NASA Johnson Space Center, told Space.com.
Schneider, NASA’s Human Research Program; In addition to evaluating other domestic and international analogs to ensure key research objectives can be completed to inform future human spaceflight missions, the “Crew Health and Performance Research Analogue (CHAPEA) and the Human Exploration Research Analogue (HERA) are dedicated to isolation research, including Antarctica, and other He stated that he joined the “Earth-based analogues”.
SIRIUS-23 goes down in history as the first monolingual isolation experiment for IBMP, in which Americans were not involved and the entire crew spoke Russian. Additionally, Anastasia Stepanova, a doctoral student in space resources at the Colorado School of Mines and one of the scientists on the SIRIUS-19 team, stated that it is also noteworthy that four of the six crew members are women. “Sirius-23 is different in many ways from the previous SIRIUS-17, 19 and 21 simulations,” Stepanova said in an interview with Space.com. “A year is a challenging period with many biomedical experiments on board.”
The crew’s ability to cope with technical malfunctions of varying severity will be examined, as well as the physical consequences of long-term and regular extravehicular activities and night work, Stepanova explained. Also of interest will be the psychological and social consequences of being isolated for such a long time, as testing so far has proven that its effects are not entirely positive.
As humanity looks to colonize the Moon and Mars for the future, experiments like SIRIUS will decide how possible such long-distance exploration actually is.
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