Home Czechs and Mars 500 Czech participation

Czech participation in the project

The Czech Republic participates in the MARS-500 project with three research studies:

  • One of them is conducted by QED GROUP a.s., with the aim to explore the dynamics of relationships in a small social group (the crew of a simulation flight), to analyze ongoing relationship situations within the crew and predict possible disruptions of their cohabitation, in order to provide proposals for preventing the possibilities of failing in critical life situations by methods described below.

  • The second study is conducted by the Institute of Psychology of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Brno, with focus on the issue of exploring the changes in perception and memory related to long-term isolation (stability of cognitive functions under extraordinary situations).

  • The Prague branch of the Institute of Psychology of the Czech Academy of Sciences in cooperation with the Department of Pedagogy and Psychology of the University of South Bohemia and the Department of Psychology of the Philosophical Faculty of the Charles University deal with the third study; this one examines the sources of human endurance in critical life situations.

In more detail, the first study deals with the following research tasks:

During the course of the entire experiment, the QED GROUP research team explores the relationship dynamics in the crew, as well as of relationships towards the Control Centre of the experiment. These steps result in evaluation of the current state of the crew cohesiveness and its consecutive influencing through proposals submitted to the Control Centre based on the analyses performed at the QED GROUP working site. The data is acquired from each individual through special software installed at the computers of all crew members.

Data acquired from the crew every two weeks is evaluated through the original Sociomapping method which was created by QED GROUP a.s. and which had been developing from the nineties onwards. Thanks to this system, the Czech team provides an immediate feed-back to the Control Centre and, when necessary, directly to the crew.

The point of this research study is also to examine the possibility of using this system on real interplanetary flights. If this goal was successfully achieved, the Czech contribution could be extremely substantial not only for the MARS-500 project, but especially in real space flights, in the not so distant future.