For 205 days in 2011, Jens Titze, Professor of Electrolyte and Circulatory Research at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, and his team strictly controlled the diet for the Mars500 test subjects during their virtual flight to Mars.
520 days without sunlight, fresh air or direct contact with the outside world - the six test subjects on the Mars500 mission have had to forego plenty of things while 'travelling' to Mars and back to Earth in their virtual spacecraft.
'Half-time' for Mars 500; on 12 February 2011, after a 250-day simulated flight to Mars, three crewmembers will land on the Red Planet. They will climb out of their isolation pod two days later at the Moscow Institute for Biomedical Problems (IBMP) and begin a simulated exploration of Mars. Their eight-month return journey will commence in early March. "The 11 German experiments carried out so far have been completed with extreme professionalism and high accuracy," says Peter Gräf from the German Aerospace Center (DLR), who is responsible for managing the German part of the project.