Astronauts travelling to Mars could be put into hibernation to prevent fights breaking out on the seven month flight and avoid using up resources, a scientist at the European Space Agency (Esa) has suggested.

Professor Mark McCaughrean, Senior Science Advisor in the Directorate of Science at Esa, said the agency was now seriously considering placing passengers into a kind of ‘suspended animation’ and experiments were already ongoing in animals.

“I think it’s possible,” he told The Telegraph at the launch of the Moving to Mars exhibition at the Design Museum in London.

“We’re even doing experiments now on artificial hibernation to put someone under for seven months, and not worry about food. We’re talking about how we would do it. You do it with animal tests and we have programmes at looking how that would happen.

“We’re nowhere near doing it because there are all the ethical questions about how you would do it. Who would subscribe to that? Who would sign up and do it?

“But the idea is that you would sleep for the journey so you would use much fewer consumables. Sleeping is not the same as hibernation, because if you hibernate you lower the body temperature and you reduce everything else, oxygen and so on.”