As the airplane tilted steeply upward, Mona Minkara experienced gravity like never before.

"It feels like a huge pressure is on you, and the skin of your face is being pulled over the bones of your skull," she says.

Elton John famously sang that Mars "ain't the kind of place to raise your kids", but one day space agencies across the globe hope to prove him wrong by seeing the first human set foot on the Red Planet, and potentially colonizing it or any other moon or planet.

However, those who make the journey will not only have to survive on a freezing planet with no breathable atmosphere, but live in isolation unlike any other explorers in human history.

At its closest proximity, Mars is still almost 55m km away from Earth, making communication delays and supply issues between the two worlds unavoidable. This requires crew members to effectively cope with stressful conditions by themselves, with limited autonomous resources available on board.

With little chance of conducting a trial run in space, scientists have resorted to terrestrial experiments to see how astronauts cope with such challenges. A previous isolation experiment called Mars-500 revealed a psychological detachment from mission control among those who took part, raising fears that it could lead to resistance from future crews in deep space to any commands.