Six men who have been locked up in total isolation for over 500 days to simulate a mission to Mars have emerged from a warehouse in a suburb of the Russian capital Moscow where the experiment has been taking place. The Mars-500 project undertaken at the Moscow Institute was intended to find out how the human mind and body would cope on a long -duration space flight.

One of the men, an Italian Colombian, Deigo Urbina from the European Space Agency described the significance of the exercise. He said on the Mars Mission, they have achieved on Earth the longest space voyage ever so that humankind can one day greet a new dawn on the surface of a distant, but reachable planet. The rest of the crew are Alexey Sitev, Alexandr Smoleevskiy and Sukhrob Kamolov from Russia, Romain Charles from Europe and the Chinese national Wang Yue.