What Spending a Year in Space Does to Your Mind
It's stressful, but transcendental too.
FRANCIE DIEP
This week, NASA and the Russian Federal Space Agency plan to send two astronauts to spend a year in the International Space Station. This will be one of the first times people have stayed in space for such a long period of time, and the first time anybody has spent so much time aboard the ISS. (Previously, a few Soviet and Russian cosmonauts spent more than a year aboard the Mir space station.)
While they're up there, American Scott Kelly and Russian Mikhail Kornienko will take part in more than a dozen studies about the physical and mental effects of working in space longer-term. They'll take periodic cognition tests, undergo sleep monitoring, and write in journals that psychologists will later read. Agencies will use all this data to predict what will happen if, in the future, humans build a moon base, or visit asteroids or other planets that require flights longer than a year.
What do psychologists already know about what may happen to Kelly, Kornienko, and the long-term astronauts of the future? Quite a bit, actually. Psychologists have been analyzing astronaut diaries and other first-person anecdotes for decades. They've also developed new ways to help astronauts cope with the increasingly international flavor of space missions, although on-board psychiatric help might still be a bit sparse.
more
http://www.psmag.com/health-and-behavior/psychology-of-long-missions-in-space
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