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Donna Dempsey

Publications and source records attributed to Donna Dempsey.

8 records
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
NASA NTRS2025

Trade Space Analyses: Balancing Crew and Mission Design Parameters-Candidate Mars Master Task List

In 2020, the Associate Administrator for Human Exploration and Operations and the Agency’s Federated Board requested an assessment to develop a methodology for trade space analysis comparing crew size for Mars missions against mission design parameters. The NASA Engineering and Safety Center (NESC) conducted an assessment to develop a methodology for systematic, repeatable trade space analysis for crew size and developed an initial set of human performance models and a list of candidate crew tasks for NASA’s first mission to Mars. This report contains list of candidate crew tasks for Mars.

Crew Duties and Tasks↗
NASA NTRS2024

Humans to Mars, But How Many? Using Training Qualifications Modeling to Inform Number of Crew

Missions to Mars will differ from all previous human spaceflight missions in that the crew of astronauts will be required to operate in an Earth-independent manner due to the long communication delays, making the decision on crew size critical to mission success. To support National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) decision makers, NASA’s Engineering and Safety Center (NESC) developed a quantitative methodology for assessing the number of crew necessary to meet primary mission objectives and respond to unforeseen failures based on modeling of NASA’s crew training qualifications. We present results of a custom-built model of a Mars crew qualification and responsibility matrix (CQRM) and discuss the implications on trade space analysis of Mars mission crew size.

Mars↗
NASA NTRS2024

Trade Space Analyses: Balancing Crew and Mission Design Parameters

In 2020, the Associate Administrator for Human Exploration and Operations and the Agency’s Federated Board requested an assessment to develop a methodology for trade space analysis comparing crew size for Mars missions against mission design parameters. The NASA Engineering and Safety Center (NESC) conducted an assessment to develop a methodology for systematic, repeatable trade space analysis for crew size and developed an initial set of human performance models and a list of candidate crew tasks for NASA’s first mission to Mars. This report contains the results of the NESC assessment.

Humans to Mars↗
NASA NTRS2024

Assessing the Number of Crew for Mars Against Trade Space Parameters

Missions to Mars will differ from all previous human spaceflight missions in that the onboard crew of astronauts will be required to operate in an Earth-independent manner given the long communication delays on Mars missions. Without a systematic, repeatable process to determine the number and composition of crew necessary to successfully accomplish these missions, NASA increases the risk in that crew sizes may be too small to meet primary mission objectives under nominal conditions and, more consequentially, the crewmembers may not have the expertise needed to successfully respond to unforeseen failures without the real-time expertise in the Mission Control Central (MCC) team on which NASA has come to rely. We present a framework for trade space analysis along with results from human-performance models developed in IMPRINT. We discuss the implications of model results on the trade space for number of crew for missions to Mars. This work was funded by the NASA Engineering and Safety Center (NESC) with support from NASA’s Human Research Program (HRP).

Donna Dempsey↗
NASA NTRS2020

Effects of Long-Duration Space Flight on Training Retention and Transfer

The space environment imposes on the astronaut crew significant physiological, psycho-social, and cognitive loads that can not be replicated on the ground. These loads likely impact crew performance. To date, no systematic data collection has taken place to understand the effects of such loads on crew members’ ability to retain trained knowledge and skills, and to transfer such knowledge and skills to novel situations. The research described here was originally requested by HRP management to be the first such study to systematically collect data on the effects of long duration space flight on training retention and transfer. Because current theories of retention and transfer are based on results obtained in university laboratories using undergraduate students as research participants, and because crew time in space is very expensive, this study was designed to compare the performance of 4 groups of subjects: crew members in space, crew members on the ground, crew-like subjects, and university undergraduate students. Results from the ground-phase of the study reported here demonstrate that crew members’ performance under cognitive load can not be predicted from the performance of university undergraduate students. It is still an open question the extent to which crew members’ cognitive performance in space can be predicted from the performance of crew members on the ground.

training↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Humans to Mars, but How Many? Using Training Requirements Modeling to Inform Crew Size

Missions to Mars will differ from previous human spaceflight missions in that the onboard crew of astronauts will be required to operate in an Earth-independent manner due to the long communication delays. Without a systematic, repeatable process to determine the number and composition of crew necessary to successfully accomplish these missions, NASA increases the risk that crew sizes may be too small to meet primary mission objectives under nominal conditions and, more consequentially, that crewmembers may not have the expertise needed to successfully respond to unforeseen failures without the real-time expertise of the Mission Control Central (MCC) team NASA currently relies upon. The NASA Engineering and Safety Center (NESC) is developing a methodology for assessing the trade space of factors that affect the number of crew for future missions. This methodology includes the consideration of results from three human performance models developed using the Improved Performance Research and Integration Tool (IMPRINT) modeling platform as well as a custom-built model on expertise trained within the crew. The IMPRINT results will be presented in the modeling and simulation sub-tag. Here we present results of a model based on NASA’s crew qualification and responsibility matrix (CQRM), a tool used to identify the crew qualifications for each area of responsibility (operation, system, and payload) for a mission. The model outputs an optimized allocation of training assignments along with a flight-assigned CQRM that can be used to consider the expertise that can be trained within a crew of a given size. We discuss the CQRM model result implications on the trade space for Mars mission crew size.

Mars↗