Scientists have mapped how different features of a space habitat affect astronauts’ mental, emotional and social health, in a new study He studies.
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Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the University of Colorado Boulder in the US examined the links between features such as lighting, privacy and layout of living spaces, experiences including anxiety, homesickness and fatigue and relationships between crew members.
The idea is to give engineers a clearer way to consider astronauts’ mental health when designing habitats for long-duration space missions.
“The awareness has been around for some time that living in space is difficult,” Mitch Lin, lead author of the study and a doctoral candidate in the Human Systems Laboratory and Engineering Systems Laboratory at MIT, said in a press release.
“We have come a long way from the human in a tin can,” she added. “As our priorities shift toward long-duration exploration missions, ensuring the crew is safe, healthy, happy and productive has become even more important.”
In extreme environments, habitats are usually built primarily for survival. Submarines, Antarctic bases and spacecraft must protect people from immediate physical dangers, often in a very limited space.
Spaceflight can put astronauts under great psychological pressure. Isolation and confinement can affect sleep, mood, cognitive performance, and relationships within the crew, while living without normal day and night cycles can disrupt the body’s circadian rhythm.
But as humans prepare for longer missions to the Moon and eventually Mars, astronauts could spend months or even years confined to the same small group of people, far from family and friends with little chance of leaving their surroundings.
How much can design help?
Researchers conducted an extensive and iterative review of the scientific literature on livability in space and other extreme environments to find evidence linking the surrounding physical environment to behavioral health.
They used the research to build a map containing 68 factors and 167 links showing how aspects of the environment can influence behavioral health and performance.
They focused on 14 emotions and experiences that can be influenced by habitat design, including anxiety, independence, curiosity, fatigue, nostalgia and kinship.
They then mapped how different design factors contributed to these results.
Lighting, for example, can affect sleep and circadian rhythms. The amount of privacy available to crew members can affect stress and independence, while the arrangement of shared spaces, corridors and doorways can determine how often people interact with each other.
At the same time, access paths, stairs and doorways can contribute to friendships and social cohesion because they influence how often people naturally encounter each other.
The researchers also suggest looking into features that could help astronauts develop a stronger attachment to where they live in order to reduce homesickness. This can include greater privacy and spaces that crew members can reconfigure or customize.
“Habitat and behavioral health have never been linked like this before,” Lin said. “So we made those connections for the first time.”
The research team says the same approach could also be applied on land, including submarines, oil rigs, Antarctic expeditions and other environments where people spend long periods isolated and confined.
The researchers also made the results available through an interactive website called the Human-Environment Communication and Interaction Atlas (HECIA), where designers can explore the different connections.
However, the researchers stress that the tool and the ideas behind it are not a one-size-fits-all guide to designing extreme habitats. The appropriate design depends on the specifications and constraints of each habitat.
