The weak points of NASA's Mars mission are revealed

WASHINGTON: Scientists Develop Predictive Model to Help NASA Anticipate Conflicts and Communication Problems Between Crew Members and End the Problems that Could Make the US Space Agency's Future Human Mission on Mars .

NASA has formalized plans to send a crewed spaceship to Mars, a trip that could involve 250 million miles of travel, researchers at Northwestern University in the United States said.

As part of a multi-phase study, scientists are studying the behavior of analog astronaut crews during simulated missions, including isolation, lack of sleep, specially designed tasks and mission control, which mimic real movements in space with delayed communication.

The goal is to establish the effects of isolation and containment on the operation of the team, to identify methods to improve the team's performance, to develop a predictive model that NASA could use to build the ideal team and identify potential problems with teams already composed before and during the mission. .

Even for an astronaut, the psychological demands of this trip to Mars will be exceptional.

The spacecraft will be small, about the size of a studio, and the round trip will last almost three years.

"Astronauts are superhumans, incredibly fit and in perfect physical shape," said Leslie DeChurch, a professor at Northwestern University.

"We are taking an already state-of-the-art crew selection system and are further improving it by finding the values, features and other features that will enable Nasa to compose crews. that will be heard, "DeChurch said.

Delays in communication with mission controls around the world will exceed 20 minutes. In this sense, the mission on Mars will not resemble any previous mission.

"Many efforts to try to create models to simulate the future have been criticized because people said it was not really based on good data," said Noshir Contractor, a professor at Northwestern University.

"What we have here is good, unprecedented data, we are not talking about intuition or expert opinions, this model is based on real data," said the contractor. .

The researchers collected data in the Human Experiment Analysis (HERA) at Johnson Space Center in Houston.

The HERA capsule simulator houses astronauts for up to 45 days; a mission control simulation outside the capsule increases realism with sound effects, vibrations and communication delays.

People indoors suffer sleep deprivation and attempt to perform tasks. Researchers collect punctual measurements on individual performances, moods, psychosocial adaptation, etc.

The teams studied the reduced ability to think creatively and solve problems, according to the results of the first eight analogue space teams, and are able to complete tasks between 20 and 60% of the time.

"Creative thinking and problem solving are the things that will really count in a Mars mission.We need the crew to get the right answer 100% of the time," said DeChurch.

Researchers are also extending the experiment to the SIRIUS analogue in Moscow, where, as of March 15, four Russians and two Americans will undertake a 120-day lunatic mission around the moon, including an operation to fight the moon. lunar landing.