Using Sociomapping of crew communication and cooperation as a tool for team performance management in the ground-based experiment simulating manned flight to Mars
Abstrakt
Project MARS-500, hosted by the Institute of Bio-Medical Problems in Moscow in cooperation with the European Space Agency, is a multidisciplinary experiment simulating conditions during long lasting space flights. An international crew composed of 6 members has been placed in a ground based experimental replica of a spacecraft module.
We employed a sociometric method termed Sociomapping in order to analyze crew communication and cooperation. The objective of our research was to verify usage of Sociomapping as a tool for monitoring of group dynamics and demonstrate whether or not it was possible to increase the crew safety during long lasting space flights by early diagnosis of possible communication failures between crew members.
Findings from the pilot stage of this experiment (MARS-105) will be presented. The results show that the outputs from Sociomapping analyses (i.e., Sociomaps) can be used effectively for an early intervention in the crew as well as for the team development within the context of a long range space missions.