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Will Living On Mars Drive Us Crazy?

Posted by samzenpus on from the can't-you-hear-them?-didn't-you-see-the-crowd? dept.

Hugh Pickens DOT Com (2995471) writes "When astronauts first began flying in space, NASA worried about 'space madness,' a mental malady they thought might arise from humans experiencing microgravity and claustrophobic isolation inside of a cramped spacecraft high above the Earth. Now Megan Garber writes in The Atlantic that NASA is hoping to find out what life on Mars does to the human emotional state by putting three men and three women in a 1,000-square-foot habitat shaped like a dome for four months. The volunteers in the second HI-SEAS mission — a purposely tiny group selected out of a group of 700 applicants — include, among others, a neuropsychologist, an aerospace engineer, and an Air Force veteran who is studying human factors in aviation. 'We're going to stress them,' says Kim Binsted, the project's principal investigator. 'That's the nature of the study.' That test involves isolating the crew in the same way they'd be isolated on Mars. The only communication they'll be allowed with the outside world—that is to say, with their family and friends—will be conducted through email. (And that will be given an artificial delay of 20 minutes to simulate the lag involved in Mars-to-Earth communications.)

If that doesn't seem too stressful, here's another source of stress: Each mission member will get only eight minutes of shower time ... per week. The stress will be compounded by the fact that the only time the crew will be able to leave their habitat-yurt is when they're wearing puffy, insulated uniforms that simulate space suits. In the Hawaiian heat. Throughout the mission, researchers will be testing the subjects' moods and the changes they exhibit in their relationships with each other. They'll also be examining the crew members' cognitive skills, seeing whether—and how—they change as the experiment wears on. Binsted says the mission has gotten the attention of the TV world but don't expect to see much inside-the-dome footage. 'You wouldn't believe the number of producers who called us,' says Binsted. 'Fortunately, we're not ethically allowed to subject our crew to that kind of thing.'"

7 of 150 comments (clear)

  1. In the heat... by Shadow+of+Eternity · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Wouldn't mars be frostbitingly COLD though?

    --
    A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
    1. Re:In the heat... by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Wouldn't mars be frostbitingly COLD though?

      Depends. Mar's nominal temperature ranges from 'cold' to 'really cold, some of the ice is frozen carbon dioxide, some of it might be water'; but it also has a pretty tenuous(maximum is something like 1% of earth's, lower as you go higher) atmosphere, so heat transfer by direct conduction and convection would be weaker than you'd expect for earth(though greater than in orbit, where those basically aren't factors at all, and where you don't have the option of using the ground as a heatsink).

      It wouldn't be as bad as orbit(where the nominal temperature is also damn low; but where being cooked alive because you've got nothing but black-body radiation to shed heat from your metabolic processes and suit hardware is the bigger potential danger); but the nominally freezing atmosphere would still cool you much less well than experience on earth would lead you to expect. I don't know exactly what sort of in-suit climate control the people who actually know this stuff properly estimate you'd need, and how much of the time it would be warming you, and how much active-cooling you.

      Barring nontrivial advances, though, it would probably still be more suit than you really want to wear in a gravity well(even a fairly weak one), and the need to be gas-tight would presumably make it even more obnoxious than just the weight.

  2. What's the big deal? by Maury+Markowitz · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The Navy's been doing this for years, I find it difficult to understand why mixing in microgravity will suddenly make people go nuts.

    1. Re:What's the big deal? by Stargoat · · Score: 5, Insightful

      How about on a sailing ship then? And instead of 3 men and 3 women, make it 35 men. And let's not touch land for three years, as some of the old whalers did. And let's make sure that everyone knows there is a minimum of a 20% mortality starting off. And let's enforce discipline with a rope's end.

      Humanity has been there and done that.

      --
      Hoist Number One and Number Six.
  3. Re:Why not? Living on Earth does by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    I don't see how that would be different from living here.

    On Earth, you coworkers don't shower by choice. In there, they don't shower by law.

  4. What? by argStyopa · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "...The stress will be compounded by the fact that the only time the crew will be able to leave their habitat-yurt is when they're wearing puffy, insulated uniforms that simulate space suits..."

    Seriously, they're doing this in HAWAII?

    That quote above is pretty much normal life for 6 months every year in MN...he said, looking out the window at 10" of new snow on April 4.

    I'm only 80% joking. I kind of wonder if the people from here (and northward into America's hat) would be just psychologically better prepared for this sort of thing from a lifetime of having great chunks of your year sequestered inside.

    --
    -Styopa
  5. Re:The irony of ethics. by qwijibo · · Score: 5, Funny

    Great, so there would be people who left earth forever only to get voted off of mars.