The project organizers? goal was to identify the biggest challenges for building long-duration space habitats, like the kind you?d need for a 500-plus-day mission to Mars. The 520-day mission, in which the participants were sealed inside a faux spaceship near Moscow, concluded back in November 2011. But the published results and scientific discoveries based on the experiment are still trickling in.
In a study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, the National Space Biomedical Research Institute in Houston, and other U.S. research groups collaborating with the Russian Academy of Sciences looked at the sleep and activity patterns of the Mars-500 crew members. Researcher Mathias Basner of the University of Pennsylvania tells PM that the team came up with some surprising results.
1. Not Everyone Is Up for It
During the 520-day mission, participants from Russia, Europe, and China?all men?lived aboard a habitat the same size and dimensions that might be expected for a Mars-bound spacecraft. They limited their contact with the outside world to what they would experience on their journey, with ever-increasing communications lags as they drifted further from Earth, up to the 14-minute lag that the Curiosity rover currently experiences when trying to talk to Earth from the surface of Mars.
"One of our major findings is that there are huge inter-individual differences in how well subjects cope . . .over this sort of long period of confinement and isolation," Basner says. The Mars-500 project showed the feasibility of sending humans to our neighboring planet, he says. But it also demonstrated the importance of weeding out future astronauts who won?t cope well on long-duration voyages, and helping those who do make the cut adapt to extended confinement in an artificial environment.
2. You Can?t Predict in Advance How a Person Will Cope
Even though the crew was carefully screened in advance and all were highly trained professionals?including a trauma surgeon, a psychologist, and a Russian navy diver?they still had problems.
One person on the Mars-520 crew developed mild depression. Another became chronically sleep deprived, with a corresponding degradation in performance in alertness tests. Another began napping frequently during the time when all crew members were supposed to be awake, while another somehow became adapted to an internal 25-hour clock rather than the normal 24-hour cycle. That meant, says Basner, that that crew member (who, like the others, is designated by a letter in the study to protect his privacy) was in exact opposition to the rest of the crew every 12 days, fully awake during their sleep period.
Future Mars-bound astronauts will be expected to perform at their best not only at the start, during midpoint activities on Mars, and at the conclusion of the mission?when novelty and excitement is at a high?but also during what is likely to be a long stretch of monotony that could be punctuated by unforeseen emergencies. But without being put to the test, no one can tell who will remain at his or her best during extended confinement.
Things get weird in isolation.
3. The Worst Comes Early
One bit of pleasant news from the Mars-500 experiment: The effects of living in a can under artificial light don?t change much after the first two or three months. So, while future astronauts will have to endure long stretches cooped up in a spaceship, it probably won?t be necessary to subject them to testing like this experiment that duplicates the duration of the mission. The worst of any negative effects are likely to show up within the first few weeks of a simulated journey.
4. Mars Is Just Different Enough to Be Annoying
Earth has a 24-hour day/night cycle. Mars? cycle is 24.6 hours. Those 36 minutes might not seem important, but they add up day after day. The Mars-500 team made a simulated Martian-surface excursion, but it lasted just 12 days, not long enough for the "astronauts" to adapt. Some proposed mission profiles have astronauts staying on Mars for months at a time before returning home. In that case, the astronauts would find themselves out of sync, which could invite the kind of sleep disturbances and other problems exhibited on the Mars-520 mission unless they adjusted.
5. Earthbound Office Drones Need to Get Out More Too
If you?re feeling some of the same symptoms that the Mars-500 team suffered, such as disrupted sleep, lethargy, and degraded performance, the causes could be similar to those that made the cooped-up cosmonauts loopy.
"I?m lucky enough to have a window in my office," Basner says, "but a lot of people don?t. They are exposed to the same artificial fluorescent lighting that the surrogate astronauts were on our Mars mission. We?re not exposing ourselves to enough daylight during the day." The lesson for the rest of us: Get outside more during the day.
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