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The Mars mission astronauts selected by their home countries will be the best of the best, technically skilled and equally gifted with the kind of ego required to have the self-confidence they need. At the same time, a team of all-stars is not as important as having colleagues who prioritize team cohesion over personal accomplishment.

“You have to have people who are very comfortable being by themselves and isolated, yet also comfortable working collaboratively on a team, because what they have to do is going to be a combination of both,” says Mathieu. “There’s going to be an awful lot of solo work. The combination of being good alone, versus working collaboratively — people tend to fall on one side or the other of the spectrum. It’s a unique population that can do both.”

Mathieu is reluctant to take sports metaphors too far, but working from an office on the UConn campus in Storrs where the walls are filled with framed sports pages featuring the Boston Red Sox, Mathieu (himself a kind of Jason Varitek, savvy and solid like the retired all-star catcher) agrees that what you want might be someone like second baseman Dustin Pedroia.

“He has an awful lot of the attributes you’d be looking for,” Mathieu says. “He tries to build other people around him. He grits things out. You get everything from him, every day. But if you watch him closely, you’ll see him try to develop other people. You’ll see him managing the dugout. He’s the one who pulls his teammate away from the umpire when they’re having a hot moment. He is the ultimate team guy.”

At the same time, you don’t necessarily want six copies of the same person. Once the team members are known, Mathieu’s research will help assess each individual to determine which role he or she is best suited for, and then train them for that role. Mathieu has identified the participants any team needs to be successful. You need an Organizer who pays attention to accomplishments and whether or not the team is progressing toward set goals on schedule; a Doer who rolls up his or her sleeves and turns to-do lists into done lists; a Challenger who questions assumptions, critiques ideas in a productive way, and proposes alternative solutions to problems; an Innovator who can think divergently and offer creative right-brain proposals when linear thinking leads to dead ends; a Team Builder who is supportive and positive and calm when others are stressed or down; and finally you need a Connector, attentive to the team’s interpersonal relationships or frictions who also serves as a bridge to authorities outside the team.

“There’s a lot of moderates in the right person,” Mathieu says. “You want somebody who’s conscientious, so you have planning and timeliness, but you don’t want someone who’s so rigid that they drive you crazy. You want them to be agreeable but not too agreeable. You want them to be stable, but you don’t want them to be Mr. Spock from “Star Trek.” You’ll want to be able to see some emotion.”

Detecting and interpreting those emotions gains importance in the second phase of the mission, when the training is over and the team leaves Earth’s atmosphere, where the more challenging job of team maintenance begins. The team will need to be self-sustaining and self-correcting, but to do that, you need to be able to self-assess and self-monitor, which is more difficult. Mathieu and his research partners have developed tools to assist.

One is a device astronauts might wear called a Sociometric Solutions Badge, about the size of a cellphone, that can measure things like movement, proximity to others, and changes in vocal tone and inflection; it would detect when someone is stressed or upset, talking over a teammate, or spending too much time alone. In twenty years, the technology needed to measure such things will surely exceed what we have now.

“Certain kinds of signatures or patterns might signal that the team is starting to unravel a bit, so maybe it would be worthwhile to trigger an intervention or some remedial kind of action.” The badges will monitor the team in a way that’s unobtrusive. “You don’t want to be Big Brother. These folks don’t want to be monitored 24/7.”

But how do you intervene when there are no therapists on board and you can’t get outside help? Mathieu’s other tool, to head off problems before they escalate, is a program called Debrief Now, a kind of psycho-emotional survey astronauts can take, using an iPad or touchscreen, that will help them identify what kinds of things need to be addressed. In the futures we often see in science fiction, our big-brained selves have evolved to transcend our frailties and petty annoyances; in reality, that’s probably not going to happen.

“There will be a lot of roommate issues. Here on Earth,” Mathieu says, “I could go to lunch with someone, and I might make some noise when I eat, and the other person might notice it and not like it, and think it was irritating, but it’s no biggie because it’s just lunch. If you have to live with me in a box for three years, those roommate issues are suddenly going to be consequential.

“I ask questions like ‘Do I think we make decisions in a timely fashion? Do I have the proper amount of input in the decisions that we make? Are the joint meals enjoyable? Am I having trouble sleeping? Are the sleeping arrangements working well?’ In real life, we tend not to talk about icky things. The things that may be troubling you, or may be troubling me, some difficulty dealing with one another on some joint task, we tend not to talk about it. And then when we do, it tends to unravel pretty quickly.”