Imagine being trapped in your house for a year and a half. The only people you get to see are your five roommates. All of your meals come out of a can or microwavable pouch. You have no internet access, and your communications with the outside world are limited.

Such was the experience of the Mars500 crew — a team of 6 pseudo-astronauts who spent 520 days inside an isolation facility in Moscow as part of an experiment exploring the psychosocial challenges of a journey to Mars and back.

The experiment finished in 2011, and hundreds of studies have analyzed the results of the longest spaceflight simulation in history. Now researchers from the Czech Republic have published a new analysis.

To learn more about the crew's experience of extreme isolation, the researchers interviewed each member 12 days after the experiment ended. "We asked the participants to think about their time spent on the project as a 'story', to divide the story into chapters, give names to the chapters and briefly describe their content," the study authors write.

The paper includes lots of direct quotes from the astronauts themselves. The crew members were from Russia, France, Italy, and China, so in the excerpts below, the English is a little choppy at times, and the speakers are not identified.

Here are some of the most enlightening takeaways from the interviews.

Chapter I: Adaptation

Mars500 crew portrait from their "return trip" from Mars. ESA The crew members describe the first two to four months of the isolation experiment as an adjustment period. There was a lot of work to do, but it was new, and by the sounds of things, spirits were high.

"I did not feel too much isolated, we needed a long time to adapt to a new environment and relationships between each other and I think we spent a lot of time about how to use the module, check the food, who will prepare the food for tomorrow, who will prepare the work for tomorrow."

Chapter II: Boredom

As daily activities became more routine, the newness of the experiment wore off and monotony set in.

"[Y]ou did not want to learn anything, study anything....We shut ourselves in our personal room..." "It was the same every day, the same walls, the same floor, each day was just like the others, it was like in normal life, nothing unusual... Every month the same experiments, the same tasks were repeated, it was all like one and the same month which repeats itself over and over again – we did the same experiments time and time again, completed the same questionnaires..." "[T]o be honest I was expecting maybe more work, more interesting work, there was not really much of it. I had to create my own tasks... I sometimes felt like I was wasting my time."

Lost In Black Modules

At one point the scientists conducting the experiment subjected the crew to a 24+-hour "electrical outage" to see how they'd respond. Despite the inconvenience, the outage was at least a break in the monotony, an unscheduled action that demanded a response.

From Romain Charles' diary:

"I was still in my room when, around at 13:00 hours, suddenly the power went down and everything stopped around us except the security lights and the computers with batteries. The crew gathered in the kitchen to share information and define the best action plan. While the others were retrieving personal lights, Alexey and I checked all the power units of the modules. For each of them all the interrupters were OK. At that moment we received a message from ground control telling us that the main transformer of the building surrounding our modules was on fire. We did not know how long it would take for the engineers' team to solve the problem. So, to save some power on the emergency batteries and to avoid any new issues, we unplugged all the electric devices and we even removed the bulb of some security lamps which were not needed. In the end only two lights remained: one in the kitchen and one near the bathroom. To understand our situation, you have to imagine an 'end of the world' scene. We were only 6 crew members lost in black modules with a thick silence around us. The friendly humming of the ventilation disappeared at the same time as the electricity. We could not even get more than 2 liters from the tap because the pressure given by the pumps inside the water system had fallen too. Our reaction was to stick together close to the only place which still had a light: the kitchen."

Special Occasions

Mars 500 crew celebrates Chinese New Year together. ESA

Birthdays and holidays took on extra importance in isolation. Crew members had to be creative to think up birthday presents with the limited materials on-hand, sometimes requesting Mission Control (MCC) to send over the birthday boy's favorite movie or book.

"It was exciting, how to celebrate and organize a birthday in isolation, how to arrange the party, who needs to be waved to in a video message, how to make refreshments... MCC prepared special food and presents for us that we found in the storeroom, and the boys really enjoyed their birthdays." "During the first third of our stay we had about four birthdays and it meant the world to me, because we could actually connect with the 'real life' -- have some 'normal' time."

Holidays also provided high points that interrupted the daily routines. With each crew member sharing his own cultural holidays and traditions with the others, the enthusiasm could be infectious.

Mars Landing

Diego Urbina tumbles over during the Mars simulation. (This space suit is designed for spacewalks, so it's not as flexible for walking on a solid surface.) ESA

Getting to "Mars" was the most exciting point for the pseudo astronauts. The crew was divided in half — three crew members stayed in the habitat ("in orbit") to dock and undock the "lander" and to provide support to the ground team. The "Martian" crew spent 30 days isolated in a previously sealed "landing module", performing a virtual Mars landing, driving a virtual Mars rover, and going on three simulated spacewalks.

Although this was one of the most stressful times for the Mars500 crew, it was also one of the most rewarding times. The crew proved that even after eight months of boredom and isolation, they could still perform their tasks.

"Hard working days, very hard, the length of this chapter is short, but full of good memories, and work ... " "When we go out in our space suit, it was very exciting; it was the best moment not only from that part of isolation but from the whole isolation. It was the best part of experiment."

Returning Home

YouTube/ARES: live

If Mars was the highest point of the experiment, the simulated return trip was the lowest part. The paper authors describe it as a bad hangover.

"[A]fter Mars it was (a downward slope) very slope down in a monotony and not nice things, I think..." "From the end of landing to the end of July, that's about four months, it was a very depressive period, because all the most exciting moments were over, the landing on Mars was over... It was hard, we had achieved the most important goal, it was harder, it was not relaxing... there were no more surprises left, no new activities, just those same experiments day by day, monitoring, checking of devices.... the job followed strict schedule ... It was difficult and depressing..."

Communication Is Critical

When you've spoken to nobody but the same five people for months on end, email and video messages from the outside world become a lot more important. The Mars500 crew became extremely distressed when they thought their communications were being disrupted.

Communication problems "were taken personally by the crew and had a frustrating effect on them," the authors note.

A lack of communication or slow communication factored into many of the crew members' lowest points they experienced during the experiment.

"This was November 2010, I was very sad at the time because I had no emails from my family, there was a problem somewhere and I do not even know what the problem was, but I did not receive any emails that my family sent me. People from outside did not forward it to me, maybe they lost it or there was some problem with the internet or with my address... I don´t know, but it was very sad." "It was in July or in April this year. It was a coincidence, because several people did not write me at the same time, people who normally kept in touch with me, fell silent; it was a coincidence, but it was the hardest."

While the crew's access to information from the outside world was outside of their control, having such diverse roommates helped a lot, because they could get new information from each other as they shared their cultural viewpoints and traditions.

"The differences in cultures acted as a facilitator and sometimes even the main reason for communication," the researchers note.

Mars is certainly not for the faint of heart. With NASA planning to send humans to the Red Planet in the 2030s, and private companies hoping to colonize even sooner, it's good to know what our astronauts will be getting themselves into. The longest-ever human isolation experiment shows that we need to plan ahead to break up the monotony of spaceflight, that reliable communication is a must, and that a diverse crew can help.

This article originally appeared on Popular Science, was written by Sarah Fecht, and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network.