ABOVE: MODIFIED FROM © ISTOCK.COM, DRAFTER123
When he was a postdoc at KU Leuven in Belgium, Daniel Vigo helped analyze results from an experiment that simulated a spaceflight to Mars. Six crew members were secluded in an artificially lit, spacecraft-like facility for 520 days starting in June 2010. Part of an international project known as the Mars500 mission, the experiment aimed to assess the psychological, social, and biological effects of prolonged confinement and isolation, along with the absence of normal day and night rhythms.
That isolation, of course, was just an illusion, manufactured by the Institute for Biomedical Problems of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the European Space Agency. The simulation took place in central Moscow, where any sudden medical problems could have received immediate attention—as Vigo, now a researcher at the Catholic University of Argentina and a member of the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET), tells ...
