ASGSB 1999 Annual Meeting Abstracts

PSYCHOPHYSIOLOGICAL PERFORMANCE IN EXTREME ENVIRONMENTS    K. Smart, Space Systems and Applications, Cranfield University UK

The outstanding feature of space is its physical and psychological hostility and the environmental support required to live there. This kind of operational environment places great demands on the adaptive capacity of the crew members, whilst the dangers and complexities of living and working in space make group co-operation and cohesion necessary for critical decision making and actions. Crews may simultaneously subject to acceleration, vibration, noise, heat, shifts in atmospheric composition, and emotional stress. Moreover this combination is encountered after having undergone prolonged confinement, decreased motor function, and the effects of weightlessness.

The assessment of human performance in space , in extreme situations after long duration exposure to microgravity in the ISS, poses considerable difficulties. The difficulty lies in accurately determining the combined effects of psychological and physiological deterioration on the ability of a crew, either individually or as a team, to perform at an adequate standard in unpredictable and potentially life threatening conditions. For example, attitude control of a spacecraft may require a number of human abilities including arm-hand steadiness, finger dexterity, hand-eye co-ordination, perceptual speed, and rapid reaction time, where, it may be difficult to determine whether performance degradation is due to fatigue, space sickness, increased arousal, loss of sleep, or to some combination of these and other factors. In space the skills and procedures needed may not have been practised for many weeks , or not at all, and the ground support may not be fully conversant with the condition of the crew. From past experience it is arguable that we cannot rely on any single approach to supply all of the information necessary to plan performance requirements for future missions in space. Therefore using of ground based experiments with a high degree of fidelity, along with a greater emphasis on data from actual missions, it may be possible to begin to unravel the many complex factors involved in the definition and measurement.

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