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While most of the talk at the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference, which took place last week, focused on the findings of studies based on the astronaut Scott Kelly, a group of scientists have presented their research showing that prolonged space travel is far worse for the mind than it is for the body.
Speaking of the body, Mr. Kelly did go through some notable changes during his year-long stay aboard the International Space Station, but hardly anything that would not be expected in other people who find themselves in similar high-stress, high-risk environments.
Furthermore, while some of the bodily changes took as long as 6 months to fully dissipate, most were pretty much gone within days following contact with terra firma and exposure to ‘normal’ gravity.
On the psychological front, however, things don’t look so neat. A team of scientists from the Northwestern University (NU) in the US conducted a series of mock space missions on Earth, complete with isolation, lack of quality sleep, delays in communication with ground control, and close quarters contact with other team members.
“A lot of the past efforts to try to create models to simulate the future have run into criticism because people have said it’s not really grounded in good data,” said Noshir Contractor of NU. “What we have here is unprecedented good data. We aren’t talking about intuition and expert views – this model is based on real data.”
The upcoming nearly three year-long round trip to Mars could lead to severe psychological impairment of the crew. Image: NASA via flickr.com, CC BY 2.0.
The research team designed a series of tests to gauge the creative thinking and problem-solving capacities of eight astronaut crews who took part in the experiment. Results showed that designated tasks were successfully completed only 20 to 60 per cent of the time – abysmal performance considering the rigours of real space flight.
Next, the team will attempt to discover effective coping mechanisms and workflows that could empower team members to get things done as effectively as possible, and build a predictive model that would allow NASA to assemble “an ideal team” for the job.
Research on the psychology of space travel is on-going and will most likely continue up until kick-off.
Sources: astronomy.com, eurekalert.org.