One man's circadian rhythm shifted from a 24-hour period to a 25-hour period, which meant that on every 12th day his body was telling him that it was midnight when it was midday for everyone else.
And while most of the crew began to sleep for longer periods as the mission progressed and boredom set in, one individual slept progressively less, until towards the end of the mission he had become chronically sleep-deprived.
"One of the biggest surprises was the huge individual differences in how they coped with sleep," said Dr Mathias Basner, a sleep researcher at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. "There was just one member of the crew who was the sort of astronaut we would probably be looking for in terms of sleeping behaviour. He was very active during the day and slept well at night."
Identifying bad sleepers could be important on a Mars mission that requires people to be constantly alert even when the days are tediously similar, Basner said. Sleep will be crucial because it will require people to spend a long time together in a confined space without any natural cues for when it is day or night.
"The success of human interplanetary spaceflight ... will depend on the ability of astronauts to remain confined and isolated from Earth much longer than previous missions or simulations," said Dr David Dinges of Pennsylvania University.
"This is the first investigation to pinpoint the crucial role that sleep-wake cycles will play in extended space missions," said Dinges, a co-author of the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The Mars500 project, run by the Institute for Biomedical Problems in Moscow and partly funded by the European Space Agency, attempted to address a range of psychological and physical issues associated with extended space missions.
Professor Gro Sandal, a psychologist at the University of Bergen in Norway who looked at relationships between the crew members, said there was an overall harmony within the group despite some personal tensions.
"There are always going to be tensions when people live together in a confined space for a long period of time," Sandal said. "Monotony and boredom may be the biggest stresses on any mission to Mars, exciting as it may seem."
In for the long haul
17-month voyage simulated in Mars project
14 months is the world record for continuous time in space held by Russian Dr Valery Polyakov on Mir in 1994 and 1995
12 months in space is planned for US astronaut Scott Kelly and Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko on the International Space Station, starting in 2015
215 days in orbit on the space station is the US record, held by Michael Lopez-Alegria
- Independent
