NASA has its sights set on Mars, a key target for learning more about science, technology and whether life exists on the red planet. Experts around the world are developing technologies that may eventually allow humans to live and work on Mars.
But making the long trek to Mars is still years — perhaps decades — away. Scientists are hard at work on technology that will enable the mission to Mars to be a safe one.
Before heading to Mars, NASA has selected a crew of four volunteers who will spend 45 days in a simulated Mars environment at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.
They won’t be on Mars — the crew members will instead live and work inside the HERA, or Human Exploration Research Analog, a 650-square-foot habitat designed to mimic Mars, down to the red soil. The volunteers — Erin Anderson, Sergii Iakymov, Brandon Kent and Sarah Elizabeth McCandless — will enter the habitat on Aug. 9 and exit on Sept. 23.
But how might the HERA team react loneliness and seclusion during those 45 days?
The HERA studies are meant to explore how crew members will handle isolation, confinement, mental and physical health, and conditions astronauts might experience.
“The HERA simulates several of the high-priority hazards for human spaceflight. One of them is distance from Earth as it relates to time-delay communications,” says UCF College of Medicine‘s Vice Chair for Aerospace Medicine Emmanuel “Manny” Urquieta, an internationally recognized space medicine expert. “Each day there will be an increased delay in communications up to 20 minutes each way.”
For missions to Mars, new technologies are being developed to respond to these challenging conditions. Future astronauts will need to provide medical care on their own without feedback from Earth during extended periods of time.
“The HERA is an ideal place to test how humans respond in these environments and help guide the development and maturation of medical technologies,” Urquieta says.
Urquieta spent 30 days in the HERA in 2016.
“I was a Mission Specialist 2 during the HERA XI mission,” he says. “It was an incredible opportunity to experience to some extent how astronauts live on a regular routine and understand from a unique perspective the extreme challenges yet to be solved for a mission to Mars. This experience provided me with a unique exposure that helps me every day in my job.”
The habitat is fully enclosed, with no windows, no internet, and no communications with the outside world besides mission control and some private meetings. Living under these conditions helps investigators understand how individuals and teams work, and what we can learn to improve team dynamics, team composition and future astronaut selection criteria.
Shawn Burke, a research professor at UCF, investigates issues related to team leadership, team roles, team cognition and cultural diversity within the context of teams operating in isolated, confined environments such as long duration space exploration with an eye toward fostering resiliency within such teams.
“There are two types of conflict: task-related and interpersonal-related conflict,” Burke says. “The literature has shown that task-related conflict can be productive as it can produce diversity of ideas and out-of-the-box problem solving. But interpersonal or relationship conflict is nearly always detrimental to team functioning, as the conflict becomes personal and not about the task.”
Burke notes that interpersonal conflict could also potentially lead to feelings of greater isolation and negative affect if dividing lines or splits within the crew occur.
“Interpersonal crew conflicts and crew cohesion have been shown to impact crew well-being and performance within spaceflight,” she says.
Burke noted research that shows crews deal with conflict differently. Some evidence suggests that when interpersonal conflicts are not resolved, crew members may direct their frustration at the Mission Control Center, perceiving them to be unsupportive and even hostile.
The HERA isn’t the only simulated mission. There is also NASA’s Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog (CHAPEA), in which the team will work in conditions closely replicating those on Mars and navigate the limitations of delayed communications. CHAPEA crew live and work in the habitat for a year or more.
“It is probably unreasonable to expect that on a long-duration mission there will be no conflict of one type or another,” Burke says. “Crews need to work together up front to create the norms that will govern how that crew wishes to handle conflict — for example, one-on-one discussions or larger team discussions.”
