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While the 20th century was characterised by the space race, and consequently the race to put the first man on the moon, in the 21st century, we’ve set our sights on Mars.

Elon Musk has been going on about Mars for quite some time, with projects to develop a Martian settlement already underway.

NASA and SpaceX have also been working together, recently launching the first fully operational crewed mission to the International Space Station.

The former is also training astronauts for an eventual trip to the red planet.

But, one does not simply fly to Mars, and one is not lightly selected for the mission.

The first human mission will require astronauts with more than just, as CNN puts it, “the right stuff”.

Before we continue, earlier this year they put together a short video on what life on Mars is expected to look like:

NASA sent its Perseverance Rover to Mars in July to get a feel for the terrain, which predictably, is pretty rough.

The journey there will be equally rough, and long, which means that those on board the spaceship that will carry them there, need to possess a certain skillset, thus far not part of the usual criteria for space travel.

Conscientiousness, defined as “wishing to do what is right, especially to do one’s work or duty well and thoroughly,” has emerged as the key trait requirement for astronauts that will live and work on the surface of Mars millions of miles from Earth, according to a new study.

This trait was singled out as more important than honesty, humility, emotionality, extroversion, openness, and agreeableness.

“Conscientiousness, an individual personality trait, can be thought of as a pooled team-resource,” said Julia McMenamin, the study’s first author and a doctoral student in psychology at Western University in Canada, in a statement.

“The more conscientiousness a team is, the better they will likely be at accomplishing tasks.”

The study was published in the journal Astrobiology, and also uncovered the traits that NASA should avoid in an astronaut – or ‘Marstronaut’ – like “social loafing”, or the habit of a team member putting in less effort than when they work solo.

I reckon that applies in all industries.

NASA is targeting the 2030s for the first manned mission to Mars, which depends on the alignment of Mars and Earth for launch and landing. The crew could spend five years together, excluding the training beforehand.

Imagine the last set of housemates you had. Now imagine being trapped on an isolated planet with them.

To test this crew dynamic ahead of a real mission, researchers studied five ‘astronauts’ during an exercise hosted by the Austrian Space Forum in Oman in 2018. The Dhofar region of Oman is similar to the difficult conditions that the team would face in the great beyond.

McMenamin was joined by Natalie Allen, a professor of psychology at Western University, and Ottawa-based space exploration company Mission Control Space Services Chief Science Officer Melissa Battler for the study.

The AMADEE-18 analog space mission lasted four weeks with four men and one woman between the ages of 28 and 38, living in a simulated ‘Mars’ environment. They filled out surveys prior to and after the simulation to identify useful and useless behaviours that could impact the real mission.

“How familiar team members are with one another has been shown to help teams work better together likely because it provides team members with knowledge about each other and helps them communicate better and more efficiently,” McMenamin said.

Predictably, conflict among team members harms the team’s performance because when people argue, there is less time to complete tasks.

“What’s interesting is that there are different types of conflict, and so long as interpersonal issues and arguments about how to go about accomplishing tasks are avoided, differences in views and opinions might actually improve team performance likely because this allows for the team to benefit from each member’s knowledge and perspective.”

You can read more about the experiment here.

While many of us tend to think of astronauts as modern-day superheroes, they want you to know that they’re just regular people like everyone else.

That said, anyone selected for the historic and pioneering mission will need to display unprecedented levels of bravery.

That in and of itself is a super-heroic quality.

[source:cnn]