Search Results

Forty to seventy percent of astronauts and cosmonauts reportedly exhibit undesirable vestibular disturbances during the first few days of exposure to weightlessness, including Space Motion Sickness (SMS) and perceptual illusions. While SMS is the primary concern for short-duration missions, the effect of perceptual illusions during landing may be particularly problematic following long-duration missions such as returning from the International Space Station (ISS), or a Mars mission, where vestibular, perceptual and sensorimotor adaptation to 1g, to 0g, to 0.38g has occurred. The longer the mission, the more complete the adaptation is to hypogravity and the more severe the perceptual errors and sensorimotor control disturbances.

An eventual return to colonize the Moon or the launch of a human exploration mission to Mars will drive the need for developing novel surface Extravehicular Activity (EVA) technologies as well as require new operational and planning techniques. These advances are necessary to enable safe EVA access to the planetary surface locales that are most likely to yield exciting scientific knowledge, such as in the sedimentary deposit regions recently found on Mars or within and around large craters formed from asteroid collisions; as these represent the areas thought most likely to contain fossilized evidence of life or geological information pertaining to the origins and age of the planets. These sites, while rich in potential for scientific discovery, also introduce challenging terrain for exploration by surface EVA teams.