Bradford University Professor on NASA Mars Mission

Professor Ana Cristina Costa, a behavioural psychologist at the University of Bradford, worked for the US space agency at Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. She developed a study for NASA’s Mars mission, looking at the effects of prolonged isolation and confinement - essentially how astronauts might react spending a long period away from Earth and an agonising 20-minute each-way delay in communications while on the Red Planet.

Prof Costa said one of the challenges of the Mars mission is ensuring that the crew continues to function well once NASA is no longer able to maintain an instant dialogue with them. “If the journey from here to Mars takes six months and they stay on the planet another six months and it’s six months to get back, that’s 18 months. Using current technology, it will take 20 minutes for a message to travel from Earth to Mars. This means crews need to be much more autonomous and this is a problem for NASA, because it is used to being able to monitor everything, from heart rates to blood pressure, then inform crew members about that. With the Mars mission, it won’t be able to do that in a meaningful time,” said Prof Costa.

The solution, she says, lies in the trust dynamics of the crew. She draws parallels with performances of large organisations, including the NHS. One of her recommendations - training candidates then selecting them, rather than the other way around - has been taken on by NASA. Said Prof Costa:“For any mission to Mars to succeed, crews will need to trust and rely on each other more than previously. The role of trust is very important. If teams are becoming more autonomous, you have to have enough diversity not to create a groupthink effect, where everyone agrees with everyone else. This is how mistakes are made. You have to create an environment which nurtures critical thinking. If you look at mistakes in aeroplane flights, there has usually been some sort of decision based on an assumption that something was going to happen or that somebody had done something and in that moment, we find there was a lack of critical thinking.”

Born in Lisbon, Portugal, Prof Costa specialised in organisational psychology in a PhD. She has worked in human resources management, in recruitment, training and professional development. She moved to the UK in 2018 and joined the University of Bradford’s management school in the Faculty of Management, Law & Social Sciences as Professor of Organizational Behaviour and is also currently director of postgraduate studies.

To date the has secured £500,000 of external funding through grants. Her current collaboration with colleagues in Bradford and at the University of Surrey is funded by the British Academy/Leverhulme Trust Foundation to rethink promotion procedures.

“Much of my work has shown the positive impact of trust in working relationships and the importance of considering interpersonal trust dynamics. However, too much trust can also lead to failure,” she said. “In the context of extreme conditions endured by NASA our work on team trust will contribute to design selection specific methods that consider interpersonal trust dynamics and training programmes that address the shortcomings of trust.”