Hi Paxi!
My name is Anne McClain
and I’m an American astronaut
on board the International Space Station
Today I’d like to talk to you
about the mental challenges
of being an astronaut here on the Space Station
We’re on here for long periods of time.
The Space Station is not only for science and technology experiments
It’s also an experimental setting
to study how people behave and communicate
and feel when they live in a small
closed space far away from home
And this is important
because in the future when humans go to the Moon and Mars
they’ll be even further away from home
and for an even longer amount of time
Paxi, maybe you already know some of these challenges of living in Space
You yourself are very far from home
and I can imagine that sometimes you miss your planet and your friends
Here on the Space Station
I’m very close to my planet Earth
and I can see it all the time
But I have to stay on the station for six months at a time
and sometimes we stay even longer
My fellow astronauts and I
are all trained for these conditions
and we have a big team of scientists and doctors
who help us when we are on mission
And I’m glad that you’re here with us!
I also have my astronaut friends to keep me company
We eat dinner together and have fun talking about our day
However, it can also be difficult to be confined for such a long period of time
Here on the station it is very important that we always work together
I also sometimes miss the smells, sounds and colours back home!
Another challenge we have here on the ISS
is that we don’t have a normal day and night cycle
We have 16 days actually
The Space Station goes around the Earth very quickly
so we see all these 16 sunrises and sunsets every 45 minutes
And this means our sleep patterns can be a little bit disturbed
It’s important to study the challenges of being away from home
for a long period in a confined space
in order to be able to successfully plan future travel to other distant places
Maybe we can go as far as you did!
When humans will go to Mars
they will be gone for years
and it will be harder to talk to people back home
because it will take the signal a really long time
to travel between Earth and Mars
Like a really bad phone connection
where you say something
and then...
you get an answer, like, 40 minutes later!
Here we can just talk on the phone pretty normally, actually
To be able to go to Mars
we need to practice how to handle these problems
and come up with solutions
That is one of the things we are doing on the ISS
Paxi, did you know that we are also preparing to go to Mars
by simulating missions on Earth?
Let’s take a look at some of that footage
In the Mars 500 experiment
six people lived for more than 500 days on a base
that looks like a Mars base
Like me, they couldn’t go outside without space suits
And they were isolated
ESA also supports an awesome research station in the Antarctic called Concordia
Here the crew is living isolated for nine months
During the winter months
there is no sunlight
and the average temperature is -50 degrees Celsius
They can rarely go outside
They cannot go home
And they have a small crew
So Paxi
hopefully you see that space travel
is not just about machines and technological challenges
It is as much about how our minds cope
with living in a strange place far from home
How we work together and how we keep not only a healthy body
but also a healthy mind!
It’s really been a pleasure talking to you today, Paxi!
And I’ll see you next time aboard the International Space Station!