Two members of the crew in a simulated mission to Mars have completed their first walk on the "surface" of the Red Planet, as a part of the Mars-500 project, the Russia's Mission Control Center outside Moscow said on Monday.
The simulated walk on Mars was conducted by Russia's Alexander Smolevsky and Italy's Diego Urbina, the center said, adding that the walk was completed in an hour and a half.
In their walk, the two so-called "marsonauts" erected the national flags of Russia, China and a flag of European Space Agency (ESA) on the surface of the "Mars," the Mission Control said.
They also delivered speeches in Russian and English and took "samples" of the planet's surface, it added.
As scheduled plan, this was the first walk of the three walks on a mock-up of the surface of the Red Planet.
The second walk will be conducted by Smolevsky and Chinese participant Wang Yue on Feb. 18, while the third walk on the planet will be conducted by Smolevsky and Urbina on Feb. 22.
The six crew members of the mission have been living in the isolated "spacecraft" since last June.
The spacecraft simulator has been built at the Institute of Biomedical Problems in Moscow. The simulator comprises a landing module, an research module, a residential segment, a storage, a greenhouse, along with a separate module imitating the surface of Mars with a volume of 1,200 cubic meters.