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Twelve volunteers will lie in immersion tanks for 5 days in weightlessness experiment

One group of volunteers will simply lie in the immersion tanks while the other group will put on Penguin vacuum suits, which are normally used at the International Space Station

MOSCOW, July 12 /TASS/. Twelve volunteers have agreed to lie in separate immersion tanks filled with water for five days as part of a scientific experiment to model the conditions of weightlessness, a source at the press service of the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute of Medical and Biological Problems said on Tuesday.

"Twelve volunteers from Moscow and the Moscow region are planning to participate in the experiment for a guaranteed reward," a report, which TASS received on Tuesday, said.

The Institute of Medical and Biological Problems will conduct the experiment in Moscow in September-October 2016. The volunteers will be placed in an immersion tank, which, in fact, is a small reservoir filled with water.

"The reservoir’s surface will be covered with a water-repellant film whose area will exceed the water surface multifold. Thanks to that, the volunteers will stay dry when they freely submerge into the water," the institute’s employees explained.

The scientists will study the impact of modelled conditions of weightlessness on the volunteers’ bodies: their nervous and cardio-vascular systems; the musculoskeletal tissues; the endocrine and excretory systems.

One group of volunteers will simply lie in the immersion tanks while the other group will put on Penguin vacuum suits, which are normally used at the International Space Station (ISS) to protect the humans from the unfavorable impacts of weightlessness.