Will Living On Mars Drive Us Crazy? 150
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.'"
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.'"
Re:The irony of ethics. (Score:4, Interesting)
Personally I think it'd make a really interesting reality show. In fact, they could fund the Mars trip like that. Sell the entire thing to the Discovery Channel. Survivor with real consequences.
Re:In the heat... (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.
Re:Why not? Living on Earth does (Score:5, Interesting)
On Earth, you coworkers don't shower by choice. In there, they don't shower by law.
I have spent months on navy ships where fresh water use was extremely restricted. We would go weeks without a shower. Every few days we would rinse our armpits, face and groin. When we were finally allowed to shower, it was for less than one minute, not an eight minute Hollywood shower [wikipedia.org]. The toilets use salt water, which they won't have on Mars. We had a LOT less than 1000 sqft for every six people. We had some crazy people, but they were already crazy when we boarded, and the close quarters confinement didn't seem to make them worse.
This study seems silly to me. There are plenty of people (submariners, sailors, prisoners, etc.) that live in much more restricted conditions. So they could just look at them rather than recreating the conditions.