Washington, Sept 30: Astronauts stranded for two extra months aboard the International Space Station after the Columbia accident showed that humans are strong enough to make the long trip to Mars, one of the expedition's members said on Monday.
Donald Pettit, one of three members of the station's Expedition Six, said he and his two crew-mates who spent 161 days on the space station inadvertently demonstrated humans' fitness for interplanetary travel.



"The whole experience had an uncanny resemblance to a trip to and landing on Mars," Pettit said at a briefing at NASA headquarters, referring to the extended stay in orbit and the return to Earth aboard a Russian Soyuz space taxi, which landed in Kazakhstan on May 3.



"We were on orbit in a reduced-gravity environment for 5-1/2 months, about as long as a one-way trip to Mars," Pettit said. "We got in our own vehicle, piloted it down to Earth through an air-brake manoeuver ... Without any help from the ground we secured the spacecraft, we opened the hatch, we crawled out ...



"All of this demonstrates human beings have enough physical strength and integrity to go on these long missions, pilot vehicles through operational paths, secure equipment and operate immediately," he said.

The Expedition Six crew was not picked up for more than four hours after they landed.


Pettit said the demonstration was not planned, but said Expedition Six demonstrated "that there are no barriers for human physical performance to a trip to and a landing on Mars."



Pettit, along with the expedition's commander, Kenneth Bowersox, and Russian cosmonaut Nicolai Budarin, began their tour last November 23 and were to return to Earth in early March.



However, when the shuttle Columbia disintegrated on re-entry on Feb. 1, killing all seven people aboard, the shuttle fleet was grounded, meaning no shuttle would be bringing Expedition Six home and replacing them with a new crew. The Soyuz brought them down instead, and brought a two-person crew to the station.

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While aboard the station, Pettit said he and the other crew members performed "Saturday morning science," beyond their prescribed research.


Just as happens in Earth-bound laboratories, he said, scientists aboard the space station can now do programmatic science as required, but also what he called the "science of opportunity" - those scientific inquiries prompted by circumstance and curiosity.


Bowersox dubbed such experiments "Saturday morning science," because Pettit did them on Saturdays, when those aboard the station had some free time.


One such experiment was the investigation of how water moved when drawn into a thin film by a loop of wire, Pettit said. He watched how the water in the low-gravity environment of the station behaved when warmed and lighted by a flashlight or the light from a video camera.

Bureau Report