105-Day Mars Simulation: U.S. Studies Focus on Improving Work P...( HOUSTON July 13 -- From ...),Health

HOUSTON, July 13 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- From March 31 to July 14, a six-man international crew called an isolation chamber in Moscow their home. The crew, composed of four Russians and two Europeans, simulated a 105-day Mars mission full of experiments and realistic mission scenarios, including emergency situations and 20-minute communications delays.

U.S. participation in the mission consisted of three research teams with experiments evaluating solutions to conditions that impact work performance. The projects evaluated lighting interventions to counter sleep disruption due to shift work or long hours, tested two objective methods of measuring the impact of stress and fatigue on performance, and assessed interactions between crew members and mission control. The three projects were funded by the Houston-based National Space Biomedical Research Institute (NSBRI).

"The mission allowed us to look at the feasibility of certain technologies developed for improving performance by deploying them in an extremely demanding work environment. In this realistic setting, will crews use the technologies and will we get good data?" said Dr. David F. Dinges, leader of the NSBRI group funded from University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and Rutgers. "Additional goals were to see how different mission situations affected the various performance measures and to evaluate whether the interventions could indeed improve performance."

The 105-Day Mars Mission, a partnership between the Russia's Institute of Biomedical Problems and the European Space Agency, is the precursor to a 520-Day mission scheduled for 2010. The isolation facility consists of several interconnected, modules containing medical and scientific research areas, living quarters, a kitchen, greenhouse and exercise facility.

For researchers, the opportunity to run experiments in this type of environmen
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