After more than eight months of flying to the Red Planet, the isolated Mars500 crew are approaching their goal and some of them finally put their steps onto a mock-Mars surface on 14 February.

Mars500 is the most realistic spaceflight simulation possible without leaving the ground: its six volunteers are locked inside a sealed nest of modules at Moscow's Institute for Biomedical Problems (IBMP) for a total of 520 days, the time it would take to fly to Mars and back.

This story gives the status on the experiment and before the simulated landing on Mars.