By
@ArpitMishra
Building a model that shows how outbreak risk on a spacecraft grows the longer a mission lasts, using real NASA data on astronauts weakening immune systems to simulate infection spreading among the crew over a 200 day mission.
@ArpitMishra
on
Quarantine 200
I made an infectious disease simulation program for six people aboard a spacecraft. According to the results of the calculations, the danger increases with the duration of the flight, which is proven by data provided by NASA – the longer astronauts stay in space, the weaker their immunity becomes.
Initially, my program worked successfully, without any errors. However, when analyzing the results, I noticed that the illness died almost immediately, instead of developing. The cause of such behavior was that people recovered from it much faster than they became infected. To fix this mistake, it took some time to debug my program and adjust the parameters. Then I realized that my algorithm did not test the initial idea, and I rebuilt the entire simulation so that it could check two outbreaks that started on different points in time.
Showing that the simulation provides the results I intended to prove. The same outbreak, which occurred at the end of the journey, affected twice as many people as the outbreak at the very beginning of the mission. Such graph can not be considered as something accidental, it is supported by the facts of real NASA astronauts’ immune system functioning.
According to the information available, the NASA research of astronauts immune system lasts for 90 days of the mission, after which immune functions stop declining. For this reason, I decided to stop the decline of immune function at day 90 of the mission.
@ArpitMishra
on
Quarantine 200
1h 0m 13s logged
Finally put in all the test days in and all the lines are showing now. This helps support my claim way better that outbreaks in space are more hazardous near the end of the mission.
@ArpitMishra
on
Quarantine 200
41m 3s logged
Hit a real bug. First version had outbreaks dying out instantly because recovery rate was beating infection rate. Fixed by raising base infection risk (0.05 → 0.15).
Then realized one 180-day run wasn’t testing my claim, so I switched to running the outbreak starting on different days to compare.
@ArpitMishra
on
Quarantine 200
21m 26s logged
Set up my dev environment, installed Python and VS Code. Got matplotlib installed after hitting a module error (had multiple Python versions on my machine, and had to install matplotlib to the specific one VS Code was using). Wrote a basic SIR model simulating a disease spread in a 6-person space crew over a 200 day mission, with infection risk increasing over time.
