After a 520 day trip, on November 4th 2011, the six explorers that walked on Mars for the first time came back on planet Earth. They went out from the hatch of their spaceship and they were welcomed by many scientist that run to Moscow for this event. They will visit Rome on December 6th during their world tour, and I will be there to meet two of them.
How is it possible that Russia sends a spaceship to Mars and none is talking about it?
We are talking about Mars 500 mission, that started June 3rd 2010 (yes, you read it right, 2010). Mars 500 is the first full-time simulation of a trip to Mars, during which six volunteers lived for more than 520 days in a laboratory placed in the Institute of Biomedical Problems (IBMP) of Moscow. The lab simulates both the spaceship and the surface of Mars.
On the 6th of December ESA is organizing the Mars 500 Space Tweetup in Rome. For this event ESA selected 20 people to meet two members of Mars 500 crew, Diego Urbina (@diegou) and Romain Charles (@Romain_Charles). And I was lucky enough to be among these 20. The live tweeting of this event will use #mars500tweetup hashtag. So follow me on twitter (@luke2375) on the 6th of December.
If you want to address any question to Diego Urbina or Romain Charles, please leave a comment. You will find the answers to the best questions on this blog.
ALTEA Space 
Some questions from twitter (thanks to @amoroso):
1) What next for them after Mars500?
2) What’s most unexpected result?
3) What aspects of Mars mission left out of sim?
4) What 1st words would Diego recommend to future 1st man on Mars?
5) Any hobbies/new interests they started while in sim?
6) What were the most challenging experiments for them?
7) What were the major goals of scientists? Of engineers?
8 ) What Q would they have liked to be asked but weren’t?