The lunar palace
The first mission of Yuegong
The first mission that saw as protagonist the structure of Yuegong-1 happened in the 2014, when a team of three persons, two men and one woman, stayed in the lunar palace for 105 days. In this period of time, in the total isolation, they were able to grow five kinds of cereals (wheat, corn, soya, lentils and peanut), fifteen kinds of vegetables, like carrots, cucumbers, spinach, etc, and a kind of fruit, the strawberries. Furthermore, stored in the storeroom they had meat and supplies to use next to the harvest, enough for the whole period of the experiment. Beside the stored meat, though, there was other meat produced inside the lunar palace, thanks to the breed of the mealworms. The mission was useful to experiment the controlled life support system of the chinese spacial station.
The record mission
The mission that, though, signs the success of the Yuegong-1 is the one that saw involved in it the students of the university of Beijing, of the chinese spacial program for the construction of a permanent base on the Moon’s surface. The experiment was one year and five days long, during which the students lived in the lunar palace isolated from the rest of the world, like in a real spacial colony. The volunteers’ groups, always composed by four students, two male and two female, did shifts of around 100 days each. And in this case, the whole need of water, oxygen and food is been made or recycled inside the structure. The experiment, with its 370 days, signs the world record of permanence inside a bioregenerative life support. Now, at the end of the experiment, they are studying all the collected datas, to evaluate the physical and mental conditions of the volunteers and the conditions of the machines and the instruments used during the mission. Wang Yun, engineer, explains that “The program is important for what we are doing to allowing long time stay outside the Earth. Without those experiments will be impossible to have the experience, the technology and the knowledge needed to the long time human spacial exploration”.
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