ABU DHABI // Two UAE residents could soon be blasting off to the Red Planet after getting through to the next stage of the Mars One project.
Mikolaj Zielinski, from Poland, and Ritika Singh, an Indian, are among the 100 candidates chosen for the third round of the astronaut selection programme, which eventually aims to establish a colony on Mars.
The next stage will involve a series of group challenges to reduce the list to 40 participants.
Mr Zielinski, a 39-year-old software engineer, said he was looking forward to the challenges.
“We received some study material about space law, growing food in Martian soil, the life-support system that we will be using and the demonstration mission in 2020 and we will have six months to learn this,” he said.
“The design of the life-support system and some initial design of the lander for the mission are very technical documents with a lot of numbers. They describe a lot of chemical reactions used to purify water and get oxygen. This is a part that is more difficult. It’s easy to verify if someone has learnt this because you can just ask about the numbers there.”
Mr Zielinski will be part of a group of men and women from around the world.
“We’ve been waiting for this for more than a year, so if you are waiting for something for a long time, the enthusiasm cools down slowly but now I’m happy because I can finally get my hands dirty and I will be very busy,” he said. “I’m going to start studying today and Ramadan helps because I have shorter hours at work.
“The excitement is back now that I got the email because I really want to learn all this stuff and I know the more I learn, the higher my chances are of being selected.”
The groups will change throughout the elimination process. “Learning isn’t the one important factor here, even if one candidate can remember everything it’s not enough because what’s more important is how we cooperate with our team mates,” Mr Zielinski said.
“It’s not enough if one candidate is great with knowledge but doesn’t cooperate or gets annoyed easily or argues with others. I’m sure I’ll be one of the chosen 40.”
Bas Lansdorp, chief executive of Mars One, said the next round would involve finding the right combination of people for the duration of the space flight.
“So far, Mars One has been selecting out,” he said. “This is the round where we start selecting in – determining who might have the team skills to pull off our mission.”
It will also be the first time that the remaining candidates get to meet each other.
“They themselves are of course best at determining who might be the right team members for them,” Mr Lansdorp said.
Indoor and outdoor group challenges will test the candidates’ ability to work in a team, communication skills, trustworthiness and problem solving and creativity skills. At the end of each day, graphs will reveal candidates’ preferences for whom they would prefer to work and live with. This will be taken into consideration by the selection committee when deciding who makes the cut, with 10 to 20 candidates being removed each day.
“The challenges are designed to determine the candidate’s key competencies,” said Dr Norbert Kraft, Mars One’s chief medical officer.
“Additionally, individual debriefing sessions after each group challenge will provide us with insights into morale, motivation, norm settings, coping strategies and decision-making.”
From then on, candidates’ selection procedures and training activities will be filmed for audiences across the globe.
The next round will reduce the candidates to 30, who will then undergo the Mars settler suitability interview.
Eventually, after seven rounds of testing, including a planned reality TV show, the 24 most well-suited individuals will be chosen for the project.
The first four astronauts are planned to depart for Mars by 2026, with four additional crew members arriving every two years after that.
cmalek@thenational.ae