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Can Humans Endure the Psychological Torment of Mars?
NASA is conducting tests on what might be the greatest challenge of a Mars mission: the trauma of isolation.
Experimenters wanted to learn whether crew members could eat low-salt, prepackaged astronaut meals for hundreds of days without losing their appetite, weight and positive attitude. Whether they could live in harmony with strangers in a confined space. Whether they could preserve a cohesive professional environment when they are out of contact with Earth for as long as three weeks at a time. Such questions are of paramount importance, because no mission to Mars can succeed if its inhabitants cannot maintain their health, their happiness and, most critical of all, their sanity. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/25/m...xperiment.html
Sounds like paradise to me. Maybe they should staff the mission with a few introverts/loners. If none of them want to converse with the others and just want to do their jobs alone, it might work out.
Look at the Biosphere experiment done in Arizona in the 1990s, where a crew was sequestered in a contained area for some length of time. Numerous quarrels broke out, and along with food issues, was the main cause of the experiment's failure.
I wonder about these issues once we are finally ready to launch humans to Mars. I think the issue of finding people to go won't be a problem - there are plenty of qualified people ready to volunteer. We'll have have to do our best to make sure they're physical and emotional health is good.
Makes me feeling down sometimes also, that we can't even travel to our closest planet with risking our mental health. And look how big the universe is!
Some humans have always been able to withstand the "trauma" of isolation. Just read about early polar exploration some time. The hard part is withstanding the low gravity, stored food, cramped quarters, and high radiation environment.
Read a study done years ago in one of the aerospace journals. It showed that psychologically the best fit for long duration space flight was not the test pilot mentality but that found in submarine crews, or as mentioned polar, esp Antarctic overwinter crews.
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