August 6, 2007 // Red Planet?
By Shaun Walker // Russia Profile

Monkeys Gone to Heaven
http://www.russiaprofile.org/page.php?pageid=International&articleid=a1186407643
On Saturday, NASA's Phoenix probe took off from Cape Canaveral in Florida on a nine-month journey to Mars. But here in Moscow, the early preparations are underway for a far more ambitious voyage to the Red Planet – nearly 40 years after men first walked on the moon, the Russians have started a program that hopes to pave the way for a human journey to Mars.
The preliminary project, entitled Mars 500, will not be taking place light years away from earth, however, but in Polezhaevskaya, a suburb of northern Moscow. In what at first sounds rather like a reality television program, six volunteers will spend nearly eighteen months in a sealed container specifically built to simulate conditions of a voyage to Mars.
According to Mark Belakovskiy, head of the Mars 500 project at the Institute of Biomedical Problems at the Russian Academy of Sciences, the facility is expected to be completed by the end of the year and will comprise five hermetic chambers with a total area of 550 cubic meters. One chamber will become living quarters for the six crew, one a common room, one is reserved for experiments, and one will be a storeroom for equipment and provisions. The final room will simulate Martian terrain itself.
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