Brown University recently received a three-year, $638,000 grant to develop a system to monitor the cognitive abilities of astronauts during a proposed NASA manned mission to Mars in 2020. Prolonged exposure to cosmic rays may damage regions of the brain responsible for cognition, decision-making and language comprehension, a significant danger when the trip to Mars is expected to take six months, said Philip Lieberman, professor of cognitive and linguistic sciences and the study’s lead researcher.