14 DAY TRIAL // European, American, Russian and Japanese astronauts recently completed a six-day stay in the darkness of a remote cave, on the island of Sardinia, in Italy. The CAVES project, which is managed by the European Space Agency (ESA), seeks to prepare crews for real-life space exploration.
Conditions inside spacecraft affect even the most seasoned veterans, but the situation is now made worse by the fact that future space missions would take crews farther and farther away. This means that they will have to spend increasingly longer amounts of time trapped inside their vehicles.
“Even for astronauts, life in the dark, cool, humid underground environment can be a completely new situation with interesting psychological and logistical problems,” European Astronaut Center astronaut trainer Loredana Bessone explains.
During the CAVES project, a crew of five entered a cave in Sardinia, and spent six days wandering through the dark, with only partial maps of the partially-mapped maze of corridors available. The last caving team returned to the surface on September 21.