The #1 source for news about monkeys and apes

[carrie mclaren <brooklynite282 AT gmail.com>]

Former Soviet 'Monkey Nursery' Now Wants To Send An Ape To Mars

By Clay Dillow Posted 12.21.2009 at 12:32 pm
http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2009-12/former-soviet-monkey-nursery-wants-send-ape-mars

[Photo] Space Monkeys: Ham the Space Chimp was the first hominid in space.
Now Russia is toying with the idea of sending the first monkey to Mars. NASA

Some rivalries die hard. Ham the American chimpanzee stirred up some Cold
War ire when he became the first hominid in space in early 1961; now,
scientists at the Institute of Experimental Pathology and Therapy, the pride
of early Soviet space science, want to send one of their 350 apes on a
mission to Mars -- with a robot overseer, naturally.

The institute resides in Sukhumi in the breakaway Georgian province of
Abkhazia (remember that brief military tangle last year when Russia rolled
through its former Soviet satellite?), where it once churned out medical
research, as well as two rhesus monkeys that traveled into space in 1987.
When the Soviet Union collapsed so did the institute's benefactor, but a
renewed relationship with Russia since seceding from Georgia has rekindled
Abkhaz-Russian relations, as well as the prospect for sending one of the
institute's many surviving apes into space.

Russia's Cosmonautics Academy is in preliminary talks with the institute
regarding a simulated space flight to Mars that would lay the foundation for
a future mission. As such, the institute may become home to a biosphere-like
containment facility like the recent Mars-500 project that confined six
humans in space-simulating conditions for 120 days. A round-trip journey to
Mars is estimated to take about 520 days, so a Mars-bound space ape would
have to withstand confinement for very lengthy periods of time.

That's where the story takes a real twist: to help the monkey maintain
itself during such a long journey, scientists are considering sending a
helper robot along on the mission to feed and clean up after the ape. The
monkey, of course, would have to be carefully trained to interact with the
robot. Yerosha, one of the rhesus monkeys the institute sent into space in
1987, managed to free a paw and run amok during Russia's last 13-day
space-ape adventure, so there's no telling what sort of calamities might
befall a bored Russian ape on a year-and-a-half mission to the Red Planet.
Even if the mission never materializes, there's probably a Pixar script
somewhere in that premise.