It sounds like a waste of time and somebody's budget. There have already been many studies on isolation. I don't expect that this will add anything to that data. Now, do the study in orbit where the people are exposed to the environment that they would have to tolerate in such a space travel and then you would have some potentially new data, but hasn't that already been done too? I want to say that a few cosmonauts did it and that's how we learned about muscle atrophy, kidney stones and osteoporosis in astronauts (or rather cosmonauts, although America has done a lot of physiology short term studies in space too.)
Men and women have regularly done something like 6 to 9 month stays on the ISS over many years, so there's plenty of physiological data on weightlessness. It would be ideal to do this test in orbit, but that would be prohibitively expensive. The time on the ISS is too valuable and should be used for research in space (which they might be doing on the way there and back on a Mars mission anyway, probably a lot of "outside the Van Allen Belt" solar wind and other research that can't be done on the ISS). Maybe they'll do another "simulation" in Earth orbit when there's a real Mars mission funded.
I thought immediately about the increasing time delay (the further you get from Earth, the more seconds it will take for a Website click to respond - how frustrating!), and it looks like they're simulating that too:
But the experiment's designers are determined to make the training exercise as realistic as possible, so they will introduce a time delay in communications after two months.
Because it can take about 20 minutes for a message to travel from Mars to Earth, it will take this amount of time in the simulation, also.
That's of course ridiculous. The time delay should be increasing as they go out, not suddenly be turned on. But maybe that's just the reporter's interpretation. I have no doubt the "actual simulation" will be correct.
Message delay
The crew and their ground controllers will send text and voice messages to each other and then have to wait for the replies.
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It means there can be no real-time conversations, not even with friends and family - and, in moments of crisis, it will mean the crew will have to make crucial decisions themselves.
Imagine 40 minutes for a web page to load!!! Oh the humanity! I just couldn't do it.
But yes, this has to be done to get an idea how people might react and if they'll crack in the real mission, rather than waiting for the real mission and tossing a few guys together into super-expensive tin cans and just hope they get along together for a year and a half...