Poland is about to launch a fake Mars colony on a hilltop
Six volunteer astronauts will work and live inside faux habitat for two weeks to gather data organisers hope to use to support real missions
By Dave Mosher
Atop a forested ridge in southern Poland, a mission on the surfaces of both Mars and the moon is about to launch.
The two-week mission is just a simulation, of course, since no entity on Earth is prepared to inhabit deep space. But the experiment — called the Poland Mars Analogue Simulation 2017 — will study a group of six volunteer “analogue” astronauts as they work through a realistic schedule of space exploration, then provide those findings to anyone who’s drawing up crewed missions beyond Earth.
“This mission will be one of the most comprehensive Mars analogue missions ever conducted in Europe,” Mina Takla, spokesperson for the PMAS 2017 mission, said in a YouTube video promoting the project.
The experiment, which Business Insider first learned about through the Dawn of Private Space Science Symposium on June 4, is being spearheaded by a subgroup of the United Nations Programme on Space Applications, specifically the Space Exploration Project Group. More than a dozen partners are involved, including The Mars Society, European Space Agency, and European Space Foundation.