Psychology of Space Exploration

Psychology of Space Exploration

Table 1. Means, standard deviations, and correlations across all missions.
Each parameter is measured on a daily basis across all expeditions combined.

Daily Number of: Mean

Std.

Dev. 1 2 3 4 5 6

1 Total images taken 102.3 119.1 —

2 Self-initiated images taken 86.4 107.5 .98** —

3 Images of geographic interest 1.6 5.1 .25** .25** —

4 Requested images taken 15.9 25.3 .54** .36** .10** —

5 Images taken with 800-mm 17.8 34.4 .41** .41** .15** .19** —

Proportion of Days: Mean

Std.

Dev. 1 2 3 4 5 6

6 Higher availability to take images .3 .4 .06* .07** -.01 -.03 .07** —

• Correlation is significant at the .05 level (2-tailed).
  ** Correlation is significant at the .01 level (2-tailed).

Crews were more likely to take self-initiated images on weekends (self-initiated
images correlated with weekends—r = .07, p < .01) However, contrary to expecta-
tions, neither activity nor holiday was related to self-initiated images (due to space
limitations, the variables of weekends, activities, and holidays are not included in
table 1). It could be that crewmembers did not necessarily have more time avail-
able on holidays or that self-initiated images are more tightly linked to scientist-
requested approaches to the window. To address the possibility that holidays and
planned activities were not indicative of whether crewmembers had time available
to take self-initiated images, the variables of holiday, weekend, and activity were
combined to create a measure of general availability to take images. Using this new
measure of general availability, we found that crewmembers were more likely to
take self-initiated images when they had time available (general availability was
correlated with self-initiated images—r = .07, p < .01).