Sleeping In Space, by Stephen Ornes
In the article that I recently read called Sleeping In space, I learned about how sleep is very different up in space. I learned how it can harm astronauts' sleep patterns. In a 520 day trial, scientists replaced fluorescent bulbs with blue lights to help avoid the sleeping problems. A trip to mars would take about 8 months on a modern spaceship, normally people would think that one could get a lot of sleep on a trip this long but recent studies have facts that prove that the longer you are on a spaceship the more it effects your sleeping habits.
In this experiment six men spent 520 days on a pretend trip to mars. The crew spent the entire time confined inside a small,windowless capsule in Moscow Russia. The goal of this test was to learn how people could cope with living in close quarters during travel to and from the red planet.
They watched their sleeping habits over the course of 74 weeks and towards the end they started sleeping more and more. Some of them developed sleeping problems such as becoming less alert and sleeping much more than necessary and another problem was sleeping when others were up and vie versa.
Messing with sleep can have some serious consequences A doctor from the Baylor college of medicine in Housten said it could be very risky playing with sleeping habits and can sometimes be life threatening.
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