Penn profs work to test impact of space travel

An Italian, a Frenchman, a Chinese man and three Russians are locked in a room together for 520 days with people waiting for drama to begin.

This isn’t a reality show, but an international experiment to see if potential astronauts can handle the emotional and cognitive stress of a trip to Mars.

School of Medicine Psychiatry professors David Dinges and Mathias Basner are among a group of American scientists tasked with measuring the impact of isolation and confinement to “understand the effects of long-duration space travel” on human behavior, Dinges explained.

The six volunteers who shut themselves off from the world last June for the Mars500 experiment are preparing to land on “Mars” shortly. They will leave the confines of their “spaceship,” an analogous setting housed in Russia and enter a constructed environment that will mirror the appearance of Mars down to the twinkling lights overhead.

The crew has been separated from the world for these eight months, only able to communicate through a 24-minute lag time that is constructed to be analogous with real space travel.

Because this study will be more than three times as longer than a space-station voyage, it is designed to provide information to fill in the gaps of our current understanding, Dinges explained.

Dinges and Basner are monitoring motion through wristwatch-like sensors and measuring cognitive skills through performance tests. According to Basner, sleep and wake cycles — which can be measured by the motion monitors — can also influence performance and may be affected by long-term confinement.

The team hopes to discover whether crew members are at high risk for depression, impulsive behavior, or attention problems. And though the system is “still evolving,” Dinges and Basner are confident that they are “getting good data” because they are consistently receiving feedback 98 percent of the time.

Another cognitive test allows a “direct, rapid measure of the likeliness that [crew members] are experiencing” problematic emotions, such as depression, while “quick, clear, valid sample[s] of behavior” can be gleaned from video recordings of the crew members as they fill out surveys. By analyzing the facial expressions of the crew members, Dinges and Basner hope to find and highlight any emotional changes undergone during the 520 days.

However, they declined to comment on the trends they are observing because they want to avoid affecting the outcome. “The whole mission is the manipulation,” Dinges said. And since crew members have access to Earth — a fact they exploit in the form of Twitter updates — publishing trends now could cause crew members to alter their behavior, making the experiment pointless.

This is our chance to begin moving out of our countries — and out of our world, Dinges said. It’s time, he added, to “go forward for humankind.”

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