While several 40-knot squalls battered his 60-foot racing yacht Monday in the South Atlantic, the sailor Bernard Stamm had more to worry about than just the weather.

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Stamm, at the start of the second leg last month in Australia, said he was running out of fuel and had a broken water maker.

“I slept maybe two hours yesterday,” an exhausted Stamm said in a satellite telephone interview Tuesday. “I’m sitting in no wind now. I am running out of fuel to run electronics, and my water maker is broken. It is very difficult.”

Stamm, a seemingly invincible Swiss sailor, has been leading the Velux 5 Oceans solo around-the-world yacht race since the start. But he may finally be reaching his limit — and that is exactly what a group of researchers from a British university are looking to document, by using psychological tests developed by NASA to find out how the human mind copes with life-threatening situations.

Though the study relies almost entirely on interviews and self-administered tests, psychologists for NASA said the findings could benefit their astronaut-training program.

“We’re trying to identify some of the common characteristics of people who consistently think clearly and perform under extreme conditions,” said Michael Tipton, the organizer of the study at the University of Portsmouth’s department of sports and exercise science. He said the results of the study, which requires all five sailors in the 30,150-nautical-mile race to take a weekly cognitive test, would help to better select and train people working in other extreme professions, including search and rescue squads, the military and the oil industry.

“We simulate helicopter escapes in pools,” Tipton said. “But we don’t know how much longer they’d hold their breath if the real consequence would be drowning. With these sailors, that’s a real consequence every minute.”

Stamm, 42, is expected to cross the Equator this week en route to Norfolk, Va., and the finish of the second leg of the competition, a 14,000-nautical-mile jaunt that began with seven competitors last month in Fremantle, Australia. He is expected to finish the leg within the next three weeks. Kojiro Shiraishi of Japan is in second place, more than 2,000 nautical miles behind. The five sailors are expected to finish in Bilbao, Spain, by the end of April.

Since the tumultuous start, when hurricane-force winds drove most of the fleet to run for cover, one boat has sunk and another was dismasted and withdrew from the race.

Two competitors have had to make pit stops to repair damage since that first storm. Robin Knox-Johnston, 67, of Britain was towed into Ushuaia, Argentina, on Monday to fix a broken mainsail and faltering electronics.

Portsmouth’s study involves questionnaires sent to the sailors weekly via e-mail messages. The questions are designed to cull information about the sailors’ mood and the conditions they are working under. Portsmouth bases its mental tests on a model that NASA created to assess its astronauts’ ability to work effectively under high stress. Psychologists for the space agency are now interested in the Portsmouth study.

“A huge amount can be gleaned from these guys,” said Dr. Albert A. Harrison, an behavioral health adviser to NASA. “They are isolated, and under a tremendous amount of stress.”

For Stamm, stress comes in the form of daily challenges that, if unattended, could spell disaster. He said he had only nine liters of water left Tuesday morning and had been unable to repair his water maker. If he cannot repair the device, he will be forced to collect rain water to drink. If his fuel runs out, he will need to hand-steer the boat for days at a time, a nearly impossible, muscle-draining task.

If Stamm is unable to solve these problems, he will have to sail to the closest land, probably in the Caribbean, or call for a helicopter rescue.

Harrison said in a telephone interview this week that even though space travel involved two or three astronauts, the solo-sailing data can be useful for assessing individual performance.

“Sleep loss, for example, is cumulative, and it has a lot of effects on working memory,” Harrison said.

He added that solo sailing was one of the few high-risk activities in which sleep deprivation could be documented, and that the information would be helpful in preparing for moonwalks and even potential “spam in the can” missions to Mars, in which a single astronaut would take a nearly three-year journey in a small craft to the planet.

Shiraishi, 39, the second-place sailor, has had little sleep since leaving Australia more than a month ago, and he said in an e-mail interview Wednesday that his mind and body were strained.

“I haven’t slept enough,” Shiraishi said, adding that he was stressed because of the weather. The yachtsmen often encounter thunderstorms as they cross into the Northern Hemisphere.

The lead sports psychologist at the University of Portsmouth, Dr. Neil Weston, said in a phone interview yesterday that the five sailors had a few common threads. “They all have a base mind-set that helps them react appropriately to disastrous situations,” Weston said. “Their panic threshold is higher than the average person.”

For Stamm, who spends much of his time in a cabin about the size of a bathroom, panic is not an option. “When it’s bad weather, I try to control myself and control the ship,” he said. “When it is in control, no matter what, I am safe.”

He said that his biggest motivation was to keep the boat moving as fast as possible. “When it is slow,” he said, “I cannot sleep, I must keep working.”

Researchers said that the characteristics they are searching for will surface as Stamm encounters storm after storm on his way to Norfolk, some 3,000 nautical miles away.

“Above all, these sailors are rational, calculating individuals,” Tipton said. “Their inventiveness and tough mindedness is what gets them through safely.”