NASA consults US Navy for mission to Mars

Like astronauts, submariners face a number of challenges, such as isolation, dependence on crewmates, and unfavorable environments.

“We have a shared interest with the Navy in team resilience”, said NASA human research scientist Brandon Vessey. Astronauts, like sailors traveling through ocean depths, are isolated for long periods of time and have to rely on their crew mates to survive.

While working at the Naval Submarine Medical Research Laboratory in Groton, Navy scientists developed a way to evaluate the performance of those tactical teams. The study singled out important team practices including dialogue, critical thinking and decision-making and developed a way to assess how teams respond to setbacks. The examination was made accessible over a year prior to submarines’ bosses, however it has not yet been systematized by the Navy.

As NASA missions to Mars progress with science and complex human exploration missions, spacecrafts will require larger heat shields to protect against the extreme heat of entering a planet’s atmosphere and decelerating at a safe altitude in the thin Martian atmosphere, the USA space agency said.

Honeycutt began his NASA career at Marshall in 1999 after working for nine years as a contractor in support of the Space Shuttle Program, the global Space Station and other NASA programs. Recordings of volunteers staying inside a capsule at the Johnson Space Center will be sent to the scientists in Connecticut for their analysis.

The testing approach demonstrated with this test will enable future, more extensive testing of the ADEPT configuration towards possible future use of the system on missions bigger than anything NASA’s ever flown.

“Like a submarine commander can’t always call to shore, you can’t just call back to Earth for advice”. “The commander’s going to have to have a set of tools that let him or her look at the crew and make a determination about where they are”.