Submarine Q.O.T.W. 5 NOV 2015

Background

Related information, photo(s) and links for questions are found in the original posting.

Questions of the Week with ANSWERS 

1  -  What asteroid is the planned destination for the NASA space flight noted above? ANS: TBD (to be determined); here is JPL/NASA's latest published list of asteroid possibilities.   

2  -  What two primary advantages are women astronauts thought to possess over men ?  ANS:  Less susceptibility to vision disorder and; economy of transport (less weight of astronauts, their nutrition and required fuel).  see "An All-Female Mission to Mars" by Kate Greene.

3  -  What primary disadvantage are women thgought to have compared with men ?  ANS: Greater susceptibility to radiation harm. [ibid]

4  -  Who participated in a HI-SEAS study and authored article(s) appearing in politically biased literature to promoting advantages of an all-women MARS crew ?  ANS: Kate Greene- see

5  -  What do we already know has likely been part of NSMRL's earlier consultation with NASA ? ANS: How improved lighting permits more restful sleep that  can increase performance and alertness in submariners and other high performance teams (like astronauts) that may also have their natural circadian rhythm impaired resulting in fitful rest.     

6  -  When is the space agency expected to begin working with NMRL to measure how teams handle stress during simulations of spaceflight ? ANS: January - February 2016.

7  -  Why is team stress resiliance and its connection with submarine crews of keen interest to NASA now, after decades of space flight experience and human performance research ?  ANS:   Distant space flights (e.g MARS journey) involves communication delay times up to 24 minutes each way when not totally blocked by the sun for weeks at a time.  Crews must retain appropriate resiliance and autonomy to deal with emergent conditions without waiting 25 - 48 minutes to receive instructions and authorization from Earth.

Through observation of submarine crews, Navy scientists developed ways to detect  and predict poor decision making and related degradation of individual alertness. Clues in dialogue and nonverbal responses, for example, can signal reduced alertness and inability to quickly make good decisions at critical times.  If intervention protocols (advanced authority to relieve, sedate, etc. a stressed-out team member or take other emergency action) can be automatically invoked, communication delays are a little less critical. Such protocols could apply when the elapsed time for 1-way communication determined by distance from Earth exceeds some defined duration, say over 30 munutes.


8  -  What year did Navy's NSMRL's research begin  ?  ANS:  NSMRL has been active since 1942 (WW2).

9  -  Where will NASA's team stress resiliance study be conducted ?  ANS: Team test activities are to be performed and recorded at Johnson Space Center in Houston, TX.   Video and audio recordings of experiment subjects will be sent to scientists at the Naval Submarine Medical Research Laboratory (NSMRL)  Groton, CT for analysis.  

Submarines are always silent and strange.