Katya Arquilla News

CUriosity: Can humans handle the stress of traveling to Mars?

Jeff Zehnder — Wed, 13 Nov 2024 21:42:12 +0000

CUriosity: Can humans handle the stress of traveling to Mars? Jeff Zehnder Wed, 11/13/2024 - 14:42

In CUriosity, experts across the ��ý�Ļ��Ʒ campus answer pressing questions about humans, our planet and the universe beyond.

This week, Katya Arquilla, assistant professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences, looks into the question: “Can humans handle the stress of traveling to Mars?”

NASA astronaut Suni Williams aboard the International Space Station in October 2024. (Credit: NASA)

In June, NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams boarded the International Space Station (ISS), expecting a week-long stay in orbit. Now, they won’t return to Earth until February after a series of technical issues plagued the Boeing Starliner space capsule they rode into space on.

If spending eight months on the ISS, which measures just 5,000 square feet, sounds like a recipe for frayed nerves, it may very well be. That’s according to Arquilla, an engineer who has studied how long space journeys can affect the mental health of humans.

“On long-duration space missions, there are many stressors that create the potential for negative mental health effects,” she said. “From data taken in research facilities in extreme environments on Earth, like Antarctica, we have seen symptoms of depression, anxiety and stress.”

A future mission to Mars, however, could be a lot more than eight months, potentially as much as three years. Which raises the question: Can humans handle that much time in space?

Arquilla thinks so, but there are caveats.

“It will be a big challenge,” she said. “There’s a lot we don’t know because we haven’t sent people to Mars before. They won’t be able to look down and see the Earth the way they can on the International Space Station.”

In previous research, Arquilla and her colleagues explored the mental health consequences of that kind of isolation through an unlikely event here on Earth—the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2020, millions of Americans were suddenly cooped up in their homes with the threat of a major disease hanging over their heads. The researchers conducted a survey and observed that people with military training or other experience in stressful environments tended to be more productive during the pandemic than others. But those experienced individuals didn’t appear to maintain their mental health better than less experienced people.

Arquilla noted that simply being aware of your own body, and knowing when stress sets in, can help. She has partnered with Laura Devendorf, a researcher at ��ý�Ļ��Ʒ’s ATLAS Institute, to assist people in doing that kind of monitoring. The team integrated sensors into comfortable textiles that track electrocardiogram (ECG) signals coming from wearers’ hearts.

“Maybe I'm an astronaut on a mission and I'm tracking my own signals, and I see that my heartrate starts to go up,” Arquilla said. “I could decide based on that that I should take a break for a couple of hours.”

This research won’t just help astronauts. Arquilla is also exploring how similar technologies could give people on the ground tools to detect and manage symptoms of mental health changes in high-stress environments. That might include wilderness expeditions, remote research facilities and military deployments.

She’s glad to see people talking more about mental health, both on Earth and in space.

“We all, after the pandemic, understand the importance of mental health a lot more than we did maybe 10 years ago,” she said. “Being able to recognize that it's okay to not feel at 100% all the time, and being able to give people the tools they need to articulate what is wrong, is really important.”

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Improving astronaut team performance during Lunar operations

Jeff Zehnder — Wed, 25 Sep 2024 15:01:44 +0000

Improving astronaut team performance during Lunar operations Jeff Zehnder Wed, 09/25/2024 - 09:01

Jeff Zehnder

Katya Arquilla

Katya Arquilla is leading a major new NASA grant to mitigate the negative effects of communication delays on the performance of distributed teams for upcoming missions on the surface of the Moon.

Arquilla has earned a five-year, $1.5 million grant through NASA’s 2024 Human Exploration Research Opportunities program. With it, she is leading a multidisciplinary team to investigate countermeasures for radio transmission lags between the Earth and Moon as well as the length of time it takes astronauts to mentally process new instructions and act on them.

“There are communication delays inherent in lunar operations, not just due to the time it takes for a message to travel from Earth to the Moon, but also because of the time it takes people to work through their comprehension of task requirements and their environment. The delays are 5-14 seconds as a baseline, and it only goes up from there,” Arquilla said.

An assistant professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder, Arquilla works in bioastronautics, particularly how humans interact with and adapt to complex systems.

NASA is planning an array of lengthy Moon missions over the next decade, potentially including a permanent base near the lunar south pole. Construction of such a facility and subsequent science missions will require long and complicated extravehicular activities, or moon walks, by astronauts. Such efforts can be trying under the best of conditions, and could be even more complex when astronauts are trying to follow elaborate instructions from team members in another location on the Moon or back on Earth.

“Communications become a real stressor if there is any lag time that causes overlapping communications or excessive wait time that wastes resources,” Arquilla said. “We are developing countermeasures to fill that lag time with productive actions, using approaches like autonomous chat bots and automated prompts that guide the human through aspects of the reasoning process.”

To test these countermeasures, the research team will develop a laboratory-based mission analog that will include distributed teams performing realistic tasks in a mockup habitat, rover, and mission control center with integrated communication delays. During testing, participants’ cognitive load and team performance will be measured with physiological sensors.

Following testing of potential countermeasures in the Bioastronautics Laboratory, the team will select the most promising solutions for full field tests at NASA’s Human Exploration Research Analog facility in Houston, Texas, where scientists conduct simulated space missions.

The project features researchers from multiple laboratories at ��ý�Ļ��Ʒ as well as the Colorado School of Mines. In addition to Arquilla, the team includes Torin Clark and Allie Hayman, also from Smead Aerospace, Leanne Hirshfield from ��ý�Ļ��Ʒ’s Institute of Cognitive Science, and Tom Williams from the Colorado School of Mines.

“This may be one of the first projects to do this kind of comprehensive distributed team simulation in the laboratory, and it’s a really cool collaborative opportunity that is going to be a great challenge. Good ideas don’t happen in a vacuum—we have a strong Bioastronautics team and collaborators with expertise in computer science and human cognition that led to our selection for this award,” Arquilla said.

Developing communications systems to help astronauts work better on the Moon could have an array of future benefits.

“It’s about improving communications during maintenance tasks, but also in problem situations that could threaten the rest of the crew when seconds count,” Arquilla said. “But anytime astronauts are outside the capsule, wearing a bulky space suit is a high stress, demanding situation. This is something that can make for a better experience.”

Functional near-infrared spectroscopy cap on a mannequin. Sensors can be attached to the cap to monitor cognitive load in real time.

Spacesuit simulator and airlock in the Bioastronautics high bay in the Aerospace Building. Developed by graduate project teams, a facility like this will be used for the simulated mission operations.

Katya Arquilla is leading a $1.5 million NASA grant to mitigate the negative effects of communication delays on the performance of distributed teams for upcoming missions on the surface of the Moon. Arquilla has...

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Welcoming four new faculty to Smead Aerospace

Anonymous — Thu, 24 Aug 2023 15:40:42 +0000

Welcoming four new faculty to Smead Aerospace Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 08/24/2023 - 09:40

The Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder is welcoming four new faculty members for 2023-2024. Meet the team and see why we're so excited about these talented individuals:

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