Mars500 Tweetup!

In early November, the Mars500 crew left the isolation of their spaceship when they "landed" back on Earth after a 520-day mission simulation to the Red Planet.


Following the official hatch opening, the crew faced continued medical checks and follow-up studies that were compared to their pre-simulation data. Alexey, Sukrob, Aleksandr, Wang, Romain and Diego (the latter two are keeping everyone updated from their Twitter accounts) will for some time remain under the eye of the mission controllers as data is analyzed, but can now enjoy all those things they probably took for granted before in life... family and friends... sunshine and trees... life on Earth!

Some members of the crew are on a rock star tour of sorts, attending PR events sponsored by the ESA for the European members in France, Italy and Spain. Each of these are designed to communicate their experiences and early sim results to teachers, university students, media and other space agency reps.

On December 6th, a Mars500 Tweetup was held in Rome for a select lucky few; Luca Di Fino of Rome, who tweets under the @ Luke2375 handle, was kind enough to share some of his wonderful photographs from this fun event.

Romain, Kate, Stefania & Diego...
The Mars500 crew and the AFSC crew!

Two of the attendees of the Tweetup were none other than @SpaceKate and @Stelgys – you may remember them from the Mars500 All Female Symbolic Crew, a group of science-minded ladies who closely followed the Mars500 project over the past 2 years.

Luke is a physicist involved in the ALTEA experiment aboard the ISS who also writes the ALTEA Space blog in English and the LucaDiFino blog in Italian. Both carried reports of the Mars500 Tweetup and fantastic photos.

Using the hashtag #mars500tweetup, he even compiled every Tweetup contribution from the event in Rome! Great job!


The Institute of Biomedical Problems of the Russian Academy of Sciences (IMBP-RAS) recently published a Mars500 Simulation completion report, with an introduction by Roskosmos head V. A. Popovkin.

The 16-page PDF media kit includes details on psychological evaluations, off-nominal situations, Mars surface rock-collecting simulation, system verifications, crew health verifications, medical controls, and scientific programs of the mission.