“This is an ultramarathon, not a marathon.” Christina Kohastronaut of the POTa member of the Artemis team, raised this mantra when he began his mission on the International Space Station, which lasted 328 days, becoming the woman who spent the longest time in orbit. And now he wants to propose something similar for the colonization of Mars.
Astronauts experience a time warp when they travel into space, spending six or more months on the ISS. From his perspective, Koch explains in an interview with Dr. Sanjay Gupta for CNN’s Chasing Life podcast, that’s 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets a day, as opposed to the daily sunrise and sunset of people on Earth.
At a 12-hour shift, astronauts are scheduled in five-minute increments as they work on experiments, maintain the space station, and perform routine maintenance and cleaning.
Time is deforming as the days go by, changing the reality of each person in space. And so it would happen at some point, when the colonization of Mars occurs.
A solar day on Mars It lasts 24 hours, 39 minutes and 35.244 seconds, being about 3% longer than the solar day on Earth.
“We have a lot of psychological countermeasure programs on board,” Koch notes in his conversation with Dr. Gupta. “Video conferences with our families, music and TV shows that we like to load, and even the work day is all designed to maintain a kind of six-month mission.”
“It’s really up to us that the ground (crew) knows what are the psychological countermeasures that we can use to keep someone operating at peak performance even longer than a typical mission is.”
The challenge of Mars for humanity
CNN emphasizes that the astronauts in Mars they will have hard and physically demanding tasks, experiencing days longer than those on Earth.
To combat social isolation, astronauts on the International Space Station base their days on the acronym CONNECT, or CONNECT in Spanish. The keys are to strengthen yourself in these aspects:
- Community.
- Opening.
- Net.
- Needs.
- Expedition mentality.
- Countermeasures.
- Training.
Koch emphasizes: “Help others and be willing to receive help from others. Learn to be comfortable sitting with your own satisfaction. The other side of the coin is creating milestones for yourself. I think that when we look back, we discover that we have done more than we thought.