MOSCOW, December 2 The organizers of the experiment to simulate the annual flight to the Moon SIRIUS-23 modified the simulator, on which one of the participants was injured during the previous stage in order to completely exclude the possibility of a repetition of the incident, said Sergei Ponomarev, executive director and chairman of the organizing committee of the experiment, head of the laboratory of physiology of the immune system at the Institute of Biomedical Problems (IMBP) of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
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"This is a negative experience, and it would be much worse if it happened in space instead of here on Earth. In the new experiment, we took all this into account, because there was a defect in the equipment and one case in a thousand occurred. “Unfortunately, this happens,” said Ponomarev.
“Now we have covered up even more all these possibilities of getting some kind of injury and we hope that our experiment will be successful,” he added.
It was previously reported that one of the Russian women who participated in an eight-month experiment to isolate the crew to simulate the SIRIUS-21 flight to the Moon left it on the thirty-third day due to a hand injury received during training on a strength simulator.
The eight-month stage took place in 2021-2022. Three women and three men participated, including two researchers from the US and one from the UAE. Previously, within the framework of the SIRIUS (Scientific International Research In Unique Terrestrial Station) program, similar experiments were carried out lasting 17 days (in November 2017) and four months (in 2018-2019).
The next experiment, this time lasting one year, began on November 14, 2023. Five Russians (two of them men) and one representative of Belarus are taking part in it.