Crew with ‘diversity’ of personalities would be best Mars mission team: study

By Stephen Beech

Astronauts with a "diversity" of personalities would make the best crew for long-haul missions to Mars, suggests new research.

Team diversity may foster resilience during space voyages of up to three years, say American scientists.

They set out to find what would compose the best crew for a 500-day mission to the red planet.

The research team modeled how personality traits influence stress responses during long-duration missions for the first time.

Study co-author Dr. Hao Chen said: “For the first time, we’ve combined psychological insights with a computer simulation to model a 500-day mission to Mars.

“This new approach lets us explore how different astronaut personalities and team roles might affect a crew’s stress and performance, and it gives us a glimpse of the human challenges astronauts could face on these long journeys into deep space.”

The simulation results, published in the journal PLOS One, highlighted how team composition shapes stress, health, performance, and cohesion in long-duration space missions.

Dr. Chen, of the Stevens Institute of Technology, New Jersey, said: "In particular, team diversity in personality traits may contribute to greater resilience under extended isolation and operational load.

"Missions to Mars are expected to last up to three years, putting astronauts at risk of cumulative stress resulting from prolonged confinement in limited living spaces and heightened responsibility.

"The absence of personal space and privacy exacerbates stress levels, potentially affecting team cohesion and performance.

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"Understanding and optimising team dynamics under these extreme conditions is crucial, as effective collaboration, stress management, and psychological support systems are essential for the success of long-duration space missions."

With NASA’s Artemis missions now underway and crewed Mars missions becoming increasingly concrete, the researchers say there is a need to develop predictive tools capable of assessing and optimising team composition, psychological resilience, and operational effectiveness under realistic, Mars-like conditions.

To address the need, Dr. Chen and co-author Iser Pena modeled how personality traits influence stress responses and resilience during long-duration missions.

The team integrated psychological theories with agent-based modeling (ABM) to simulate the impact of team composition over a 500-day Mars mission.

Doctoral student Pena said: "ABM is a computational methodology that simulates the actions, interactions, and decision-making processes of autonomous agents within a defined environment.

"It offers a framework for linking micro-level variation among individuals to emergent team-level outcomes across time."

Using ABM, the researchers examined how five personality traits – openness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, extroversion, and agreeableness – interact with various roles - such as engineer, medic or pilot -and skills to impact the stress, health, performance, and cohesion of teams.

Dr. Chen said: "In the scenarios examined, heterogeneous teams generally demonstrated better outcomes than homogeneous teams, indicating that personality and skill diversity may support team resilience under sustained operational demands.

"Teams with variation in personality traits - particularly those combining high conscientiousness with low neuroticism, or high extroversion with high agreeableness - showed lower stress levels and improved performance, cohesion, and health outcomes.

"These patterns suggest that a broader mix of coping styles and interpersonal dynamics might help teams maintain stability over time."

He added: "Incorporating personality assessments into selection processes, and deliberately composing teams with complementary psychological and functional profiles, could improve cohesion, stress regulation, and operational stability in isolated, high-demand environments.