posted 03-12-2014 06:17 PM               

While you are in space, could you keep a diary?

That is the unusual request that Jack Stuster of Anacapa Sciences in Santa Barbara, California, has been making of NASA astronauts for the last decade.

NASA wants to learn how to keep astronauts happy during future missions. "It's all based on the assumption that the more someone writes about a topic, the more important it is to them at that time," says Stuster, who presented his latest analysis of the diaries at a NASA workshop in Houston last month. "We don't want to stress astronauts to the point of breaking, so we need to know the limits."

"One last funny story – during the first month of our stay, I noted that the labelling on two types of food packets were backwards: 'Beef Tips with Mushrooms' was actually 'Chicken Teriyaki' and vice versa. I reported this to the food people and they thanked me for pointing out the labelling error. Today I wanted chicken teriyaki. So, I gambled that the labelling problem had not fixed for the new batch of food that came up recently, and selected 'Beef Tips with Mushrooms.' I was rewarded for not having overestimated NASA! The chicken was in the packages labelled beef."