Scientists could have found the one key to ensuring that future Mars missions are successful

 Scientists might have found one key to ensuring the success of future missions: a diverse set of people to undertake them.

New research suggests that ensuring a wide variety of personality traits will make the teams much better at withstanding the complicated and intense psychological pressure that the missions would bring.

Martian missions are expected to last as long as three years. They will put a crew together in a small space, under intense pressure and confinement, with an unusual amount of responsibility.

That kind of close environment could make team members more stressed, leading them to fall out and causing problems with them undertaking their tasks, as suggested by an array of science fiction films.

To try and limit those problems, researchers have looked at how personality traits influence the way that people respond in long missions. They used a host of psychological theories as well as a specific kind of computer modelling that allows us to see how different people might behave in an environment.

The researchers examined how the five personality traits – openness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, extraversion, and agreeableness – might interact with roles such as engineer or pilot, to try and understand how that would change the performance and wellbeing of teams.

The teams that were more different in those personality traits had better outcomes than those that were more similar, they found. The researchers suggest that means that it would be better to have a mix of different dynamics and coping styles on any future missions.

But they note that the work has a range of limitations, including the fact that personality traits were not presumed to change over time.

The work is reported in a new paper, ‘Exploring team dynamics and performance in extended space missions using agent-based modeling’, published in the journal PLOS One.