IT’S the moment every wannabe astronaut dreams of: landing on Mars. Just imagine making that momentous speech as you plant your flag in the red soil, the sun rising behind you over Olympus Mons. Perhaps you’ll find fame as the discoverer of the first subtle signs of alien life. How breathtaking to see the Earth rise in the night sky, just a white dot among millions of others.
But there is a flip side. By the time you make that speech, you will have been cooped up inside a metal box for six months. You’ll not talk to your friends or family for another two years. You and your fellow inmates are bound to have survived some hair-raising, potentially fatal crises, and everyone’s nerves will be in tatters. The pilot won’t talk to the engineer. And if that geologist looks at you and rolls his eyes one more time, you’ll punch his lights out.
Despite the exciting goals, a crewed mission to Mars would mean enormous psychological stress. Seeing Earth as an anonymous dot could leave you with a profound sense of isolation, according to former astronaut Carl Walz, who spent more than six consecutive months on the International Space Station (ISS). “The impact of not being able to see the Earth while you’re in space is a big deal,” he says. Until we leave Earth far behind, we won’t really know the effects of that.
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NASA’s plans for a crewed mission to Mars sometime after 2020 are hugely ambitious. The spacecraft would take four to six months to reach the planet. After 18 months on the surface, the astronauts would take another four to six months to return to Earth, making it by far the longest space mission ever undertaken. NASA will have a tough job on its hands building a spacecraft capable of getting to the Red Planet and back, as well as finding ways to keep the astronauts in good physical shape during such a mammoth trip. The psychological challenges are no less daunting, though psychologists are now beginning to understand what keeps astronauts happy and mentally healthy. “We’ve started to learn a lot about how people really behave in space,” says Nick Kanas, a psychiatrist at the University of California and the Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center in San Francisco. “I think we now have some knowledge that we could use to prepare astronauts for a Mars mission.”
NASA has already seen how conflict between astronauts and ground crew can escalate. Feeling overworked and unsupported, astronauts on a three-month mission to the Skylab station in 1973 went on strike for a day. They eventually cleared the air after a heated argument. But such mutinies could be potentially disastrous, especially if they were to happen during some kind of crisis, if the spacecraft went out of control, for example.
To head off the possibility of further rebellions, Kanas and his team have spent the past 10 years studying the behaviour of astronauts who spent up to seven months on the now defunct Russian space station Mir, or on the ISS. Eight Russian cosmonauts and five American astronauts took part on Mir, along with four three-person crews and three two-person crews on the ISS, which celebrated its fifth anniversary of continuous habitation in November. Nearly 130 American and Russian mission controllers were involved as well.
During the missions, astronauts and ground controllers completed a weekly questionnaire composed of questions from three standard psychological tests to assess mood, crew interactions and working environment. Given a list of adjectives like “gloomy”, “energetic” and “resentful”, for instance, they would give a score for how strongly they felt that particular emotion. Other questions measured factors such as their views of the group’s cohesiveness and levels of job satisfaction.
Kanas’s team was surprised by the crews’ answers. They had expected to see astronauts’ morale decline during the second half of each mission. Psychologists have seen this effect in small isolated groups in Antarctica, when morale would often plummet after the mid-point of the stay, regardless of whether it was five or eight months. “People realise they’ve finally made it to the half-way point, but then it dawns on them that they have a whole other half to go,” says Kanas. “After that, they tend to report increased tension, homesickness and depression, and a drop in the cohesion of the group.” In extreme cases, people become fiercely territorial, so that minor intrusions like borrowing someone’s pen or sitting in “their” chair can ignite a brawl.
“Full-blown paranoia, schizophrenia and hallucinations have not been reported on space missions – not overtly, anyway”
But this did not happen on Mir or the ISS. Kanas’s study suggests that astronauts’ morale stays pretty steady unless unusually stressful events occur. “Our subjects did react to events such as a fire or a problem with the oxygen generator,” says Kanas, who reported the results in October at the 56th International Astronautical Congress in Fukuoka, Japan. “In that week, they had slightly more negative emotions than usual. But their morale returned to baseline a week later.”
Kanas says the likely reason for the astronauts’ level mood is that ground crew intervene to help astronauts deal with stress and boredom. On Mir, if psychologists sensed that a crew member was feeling low, they would schedule family chats, for instance. Supply missions from Earth also brought the Mir and ISS crews surprises and treats – their favourite foods, or letters and knick-knacks from family and friends – which always perked them up.
But one persistent problem did crop up for both Mir and the ISS. Crew members who reported tension and stress also tended to feel, as the Skylab astronauts did in 1973, that ground control were not supporting them enough – even when there was no clear evidence for this. It is commonly known as “displacement”. “It’s just like when you have a tough day at work,” says Kanas. “Maybe your boss yells at you and you can’t yell back, so you go home and yell at your husband or kick the cat. You displace the anger you’re feeling onto somebody not related.”
Frequent, frank communication can help prevent these problems festering. But that’s not going to be easy on a voyage to the Red Planet. Mars lies anything from 3 to 22 light minutes away from the Earth, depending on the orientation of the planets. So to say “hello” and get a reply will take up to three-quarters of an hour. There’s no way around that. Communication will be by email only.
And there won’t be any morale-boosting treats. NASA is considering sending a pod of supplies to arrive on the Martian surface ahead of the crew, but that will be about it. One possibility, though, is that the mother ship could have little compartments with surprises locked inside, and the ground crew could email codes to the astronauts to unlock them. “That is a very good idea because it’s an extension of the kinds of supportive activities we think have worked,” says Kanas.
Nonetheless, he says, there will be a high risk of so-called adjustment reactions occurring as the mission drags on. Full-blown psychoses such as schizophrenia, paranoia and hallucinations have not been reported on space missions – not overtly, anyway – probably because potential astronauts with a family history of such problems are unlikely to make it past the selection process. But astronauts can become anxious and depressed, or suffer anxiety-induced psychosomatic ailments. Legend has it that one Russian mission was terminated early because a crew member had anxiety-induced heart palpitations.
These problems can only get worse on a trip to Mars. Isolation might seem overpowering to them as the Earth shrinks to a tiny dot among millions of others in the inky black sky. And there will be no quick escape route. “If someone gets depressed or suicidal, you can’t send them back very easily,” says Kanas. For this reason, he says it will be essential for the crew to have access to psychoactive drugs and to multitask. For example, the first mission will probably consist of six crew, including a pilot, an engineer, a biologist and a geologist. The other two might be a physicist and a doctor – should the doctor get sick, for instance, the biologist may be able to act in his or her place.
It is the make-up and functioning of the group as a whole that interests Rachael Eggins, a psychologist at the Australian National University in Canberra. Since 2002, she and her colleagues have been monitoring volunteers at Mars simulation stations funded by the US Mars Society and the Mars Society of Australia.
“The female crew filed reports on time, but the men were late, preferring to use the time to explore on the ‘Martian’ buggies”
The centrepiece of each station in the Utah desert and in the outback in Southern Australia, is an 8-metre-wide cylindrical habitat, or hab. Crews of four to six volunteers – mainly scientists and engineers, including many astronaut-wannabes – live there typically for two or three weeks. They live and work as if they were on Mars, testing reconnaissance robots and collecting rocks in mock spacesuits. They also send reports to a simulated “mission control” in a nearby city or support organisation.
During Eggins’s studies, the volunteers completed questionnaires to assess their interactions with others. This revealed that people tend to cluster into cliques that often put their own goals ahead of the whole mission’s objectives. This led to a mishap in a Utah simulation in 2003, when the group split into three teams. One stayed in the hab, and two went out on separate rover trips, returning at about the same time. One person in the second rover damaged his helmet and was theoretically leaking oxygen.
“It was obvious to everybody that in theory, if this was really Mars, then this guy would die,” says Eggins. However, the first team insisted on getting into the hab first and told the others to wait their turn, she says: “The first team were not thinking at all in terms of the overall goal of the mission, just of their own rights and the distinct subgroup.”
In another Utah simulation last summer, Eggins’s colleague Sheryl Bishop of the University of Texas in Galveston studied the differences between an all-male crew, who lived in the hab for two weeks, and an all-female crew who moved in for the following fortnight.
Both teams performed well and were very productive, but they did differ. Personality surveys showed that several of the men scored low on “agreeableness” and “conscientiousness”, and the group’s behaviour echoed this. Every night, the women filed daily reports to mission control by the agreed time. But the men were persistently late. They said they preferred to use the time to explore outside on the buggies.
Cabin fever
And while the leader of the men’s team emailed the women’s team to say that they would give up the sleeping quarters for the handover night when the women arrived, some men were reluctant to do so. They had made a pact to hold out. “The men’s team had far more individualistic personalities, with a greater degree of concern for personal priorities,” says Bishop, who announced the preliminary findings at October’s International Astronautical Congress in Fukuoka.
Bishop stresses that you cannot generalise from these results because the groups were too small and their membership was uncontrolled. It would also be absurd to compare risk-free fortnightly forays into the Utah desert to the trials of a three-year mission to Mars, when mistakes and communication breakdowns could be fatal.
The psychologists do say that such simulations can nonetheless highlight problems that might crop up. Many issues grow into confrontation within weeks, and psychologists can test their own abilities to detect conflicts in the making. They can also measure the success of interventions like psychological training, or changing the group compositions, leadership structures or environment.
“If we see things that are problematical in small groups of short duration, you can bet those issues will be even more problematical for longer duration missions,” says Bishop. “Our teams to Mars had better be getting along very well indeed before we put them into a rocket for launch.”
Kanas says the most useful test of potential Martian astronauts will be to watch them in training – ideally on the ISS and possibly the moon, where NASA intends to send astronauts from 2015. “You could put the astronauts selected for Mars on the space station for a while and see how they get along in microgravity, which would model the trip out to Mars and back,” he says. “Then you could put them on the moon and totally isolate them in a foreign environment with no oxygen outside and partial gravity. That would be a good model for being on the Martian surface.”
He also thinks it is vital to give the Martian astronauts and their ground controllers rigorous psychological training. Kanas has explained issues like the displacement problem on Mir to astronauts bound for the ISS. When they got back from the stay, some astronauts said this knowledge helped them to spot the problem developing and to nip it in the bud.
Kanas will test-drive more formal psychological training during future missions to the ISS. He and his colleagues will sit down with astronauts and their ground controllers prior to the launch to discuss the social and psychological pitfalls. Shortly after their arrival on the station, and half-way through the mission, a 30-minute computer session will give the astronauts a “booster shot”, reminding them what they learned. Questionnaires and post-flight interviews should reveal which aspects of the training are helpful. “This is my chance to apply directly what we’ve learned,” says Kanas.
He thinks that with enough forethought given to their wellbeing, the Martian crew could be as happy as Larry. After all, happiness is relative. His studies show that on average, astronauts have lower scores for negative emotions like anxiety and depression than their colleagues back in mission control. The ground controllers in turn are more positive than the rest of us, in our offices, shops and factories. Perhaps space cadets could teach us all a thing or two.
