No abstract

Team interactions, performance, and cohesion, as well as individual psychosocial states, are increasingly recognized and studied contributions to overall system performance, but few teams will ever live and work together as closely for as long as those supporting proposed deep space missions like those to Mars or the asteroids. Yet studying team dynamics and the factors which affect them during space exploration is extraordinarily challenging since no such team performance data yet exists. The members of this panel are participating in various NASA-sponsored research efforts to explore long duration team interactions in space exploration contexts. The lessons they are learning, as well as the techniques they are developing to study this challenging problem, will serve to inform not only human space exploration over the next few decades, but also team performance and relationships in a wide variety of earth-based domains in which humans must work with each other to accomplish demanding tasks over the long term and/or in Isolated, Confined, and Extreme (ICE) environments.