Good Data

Our goal as HI-SEAS crew is to get good data about food during the mission. So in addition to rehydrating food, cooking meals for six, and cleaning dishes, we will keep tabs on the ingredients we choose, the time it takes to prepare the meal, and the amount of water we use.

There will also be surveys. Daily.  Questions like How hungry were you before you ate? How full to do you feel? What did you eat? How did you like it? What’s your overall mood? And more! Daily. 

Finally, there will be some minimally invasive nose tests because it’s unclear how exactly an astronaut’s sense of smell might affect her feelings about food on long missions. (See nasal airflow tests and especially acoustic rhinomtery). In other words, SO MUCH DATA!

The idea with simulated Mars missions–MDRS, FMARS, Mars500, and now HI-SEAS–is to try to make them as similar as possible and practical to an actual Mars mission. Of course, these simulations are a far cry from the real thing. No arguing that. But the more elements simulated, the better the data. And it’s the data from these simulations that will give an evidence-based foundation for designing actual missions.

With that in mind, one of our jobs on this mission is to work on our own projects. Just as astronauts on Mars would have their own research responsibilities, my crew mates and I are managing our own experiments and projects. Topics include antimicrobial textiles, thermal maps of our habitat, educational outreach, robotic rovers, and remote farming. As the writer-in-residence, I will, of course, be writing. And I’ll also be studying crew sleep quality and lighting design. Details to come…

 

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Why Study Food?

Fast Company has a nice write-up about the HI-SEAS mission and why food matters in space exploration. Jean Hunter, principle investigator for our food study and Cornell professor, explains it well:

“When you eat the same thing over and over again, you get bored by it, [you get] full sooner, and end up eating less. For astronauts who might be somewhere far away from home where there’s not much variety in their lives, getting bored with the food can be really serious,” Hunter tells me. “In space, they’re going to get bored with a lot of things. Having the food be interesting will improve morale, but it will also make them eat more.”

Ultimately, engineers who plan missions to Mars will need to consider the trade-offs between culinary variety and payload weight, between crew productivity and morale and time and water spent cooking and cleaning. The HI-SEAS mission is the first long-term simulated Mars mission specifically designed to study the role of food in human space exploration.

 

 

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Yes, Mars

Well, mock Mars. On the side of a volcano in Hawaii. I am officially a member of the in-habitat crew for the HI-SEAS analog Mars Mission in 2013. Here’s an excerpt from the L.A. Times take on it:

Thursday’s announcement came from the University of Hawaii at Manoa and Cornell University, which selected the crew from more than 700 applicants. Nine people took part in an intense testing and training session in June, with six chosen for the mission and the three others serving as the reserve crew.

Their mission, called HI-SEAS — for Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation — is to figure out how to make food and what foods will taste good enough to take on long missions.

Even though plenty of earthbound people eat Rice Krispies every morning for years on end, things are different in space. Menu fatigue is a major challenge, said Jean Hunter, associate professor of biological and environmental engineering at Cornell.

Over time, astronauts tire of foods they normally like and they tend to eat less, and that can mean a risk of nutritional deficiencies and loss of bone and muscle mass. The HI-SEAS mission will test whether the situation improves if crews cook for themselves.

The team also will compare the taste of the instant foods now available with their own “space-made” dishes. They’ll track the time, power and water needed to cook and clean up for instant foods vs. the foods they make. They’ll come up with recipes, too.

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World Without Email

Electronic missives are a constant feature of the modern office. But how much does receiving and responding to email throughout the day steal our focus and stress us out?

Researchers from the University of California Irvine and the U.S. Army conducted a study in which they examined office workers’ productivity and biometric measures of stress over five days when email was shut down. They presented the quantified the effects of an email-free office this week at the Computer Human Interaction Conference in Austin, TX.

While other studies have examined multitasking within the context of normal email use and self-reports of email stress, this study is the first to compare a complete cessation of email to a baseline of normal email, record biometric stress levels, and see how removing people from the email network affected other workers.

In the experiment, the researchers watched the habits of 13 workers for at least three days to get a sense of baseline activity. Then, they programmed Microsoft Outlook to automatically file new emails so none appeared in the inbox. The workers still had access to old emails, calendar events, and contacts, but they weren’t notified when a new email arrived. If someone from the organization sent an email to one of the email-free workers, they would get an automated reply explaining the situation and suggesting other modes of communication such as a face-to-face conversation or phone call.

The researchers found that when workers did not have access to new emails they multitasked less and focused longer on tasks than they did during the baseline study. In surveys, participants noted that they felt less stress. Heart rate variability was up slightly, a biometric indicator a calmer state of mind. And surprisingly, the email-free condition didn’t seem to hinder communication. Important information was still shared between the email-using and email-free workers.

The findings led the researchers to suggest that people should take email vacations from time to time. Or possibly even batch their emails so they are only compelled to check their inbox a few times a day.

The paper describing the study is here:

” Pace Not Dictated by Electrons”: An Empirical Study of Work Without Email

The conference at which it was presented is here:

CHI 2012

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Computer-Human Interaction Conference 2012

The CHI 2012 conference is in Austin, TX this year, May 5-12. I’ll be reporting from the event, posting videos, interviews, and short write-ups of interesting projects.

In the meantime, watch the video teaser below.

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