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Expedition Mars at HIS 2015

Expedition Mars has been presented at the symposium Humans in Space 2015 in Prague

On Thursday, July 2, 2015, the international educational competition Expedition Mars was presented during the Education and Outreach section of Humans in Space Symposium 2015 that had been co-organized by the Czech Space Office.

The competition has been already for 12 years engaging the young Czech and Slovak people interested in space, astronomy and modern science. This year it has the opportunity to be introduced at HIS 2015 by two commanders of Expedition Mars, Michal Vyvlečka and Lucie Davidová. The participation at the symposium of both students was made possible thanks to financial support of the Czech Space Office.

Michal Vyvlečka, a student of the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics at Charles University in Prague, summarized the basic facts of the Expedition Mars, way of selection of crews and achievements of Expedition Mars participants reached in their further studies and scientific career.

Lucie Davidová, a student of psychology at Charles University in Prague, introduced the project of sociomapping of the final crew of Expedition Mars 2014 in the second half of the joint presentation . The flight started in late February 2015, and the five-member crew of spacecraft flying to Mars experienced 61.5 hours in a small simulator cabin. The space mission included landing on the surface of the Red Planet and landing back on the Earth.

Five young astronauts aged 14 to 18 years (three Czechs and two Slovaks, one girl) went through several questionnaires and audio confessions. Lucie Davidová from the outputs prepared a projetct  presenting interactions and connections between members of the isolated crew. She based the project on the methodology used for sociomapping of the crew during the Mars500 programme. The presented results were processed into anonymous illustrative graphical outputs and they are used in the next phase of this project.

The first Romanian astronaut Dumitru Prunariu as one of the chairmen of the Education and Outreach section asked Czech presenters to take a joint picture after their performance. Also, he attached a greeting to the Expedition Mars to the photograph of his flight in space in 1981.