Jimin Zheng | Search NASA

NASA NTRS2022

Integrating Mission Timelines and Procedures to Enhance Situational Awareness in Human Spaceflight Operations

Future human spaceflight missions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond will have significant transmission delays and reduced communications bandwidth compared to operations in Low Earth Orbit, requiring increased crew autonomy due to the limited availability of real-time support from Mission Control Center (MCC). In this paper, we argue for the development of technology to enhance situational awareness (SA) for a remote MCC and astronauts onboard the vehicle, describe a usability study conducted towards this aim, and identify key usability features for the design of future integrated timeline tools. By tightly integrating timelines and procedures, future crew systems can predict future constraint violations, suggest resolutions to these violations, and ultimately support more successful missions.

User experience↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

How the Internet of "Space" Things will Disrupt and Transform Astronaut Work-life

Future long duration exploration missions will require astronauts to work and behave more autonomously. Over the last several years, we have been investigating how integrating sensors into an astronaut’s environment enables crew autonomy. This paper describes the prototypes we have deployed in Earth analogs investigating the concept of the Internet of “Space” Things.

procedure execution↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Integrating Mission Timelines and Procedures to Enhance Situational Awareness in Human Spaceflight Operations

Future human spaceflight missions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond will have significant transmission delays and reduced communications bandwidth compared to operations in Low Earth Orbit, requiring increased crew autonomy due to the limited availability of real-time support from Mission Control Center (MCC). In this paper, we argue for the development of technology to enhance situational awareness (SA) for a remote MCC and astronauts onboard the vehicle, describe a usability study conducted towards this aim, and identify key usability features for the design of future integrated timeline tools. By tightly integrating timelines and procedures, future crew systems can predict future constraint violations, suggest resolutions to these violations, and ultimately support more successful missions.

user experience↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Enabling Communication Between Astronauts and Ground Teams for Space Exploration Missions

Over the last four years, Playbook’s Mission Log has evolved to become an enabling capability for analog missions that simulate deep space, exploration missions with communication transmission latency. Playbook is a planning and execution web-application for mission operations, aggregating multiple sources of information for astronauts to execute the mission in one place: timeline, procedures, chat interface. Playbook’s Mission Log provides a multimedia chat software interface with unique features and functionalities that support asynchronous communication between analog astronauts and ground support teams. This paper describes the iterative design the Mission Log has undergone based on user observations and solicited feedback. Key features include indicators that help users cope with asynchronous communication as well as aids that assist teams coordinate work. Future work and capabilities are outlined, which build upon the increased use of the Mission Log as a communication and coordination tool for space exploration.

communication↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Inferring Collaboration Strategies and Usability from Remote Observations in a Spaceflight Analog Environment

Collecting usability and user evaluations of novel software in spaceflight analog missions is challenging. For one such analog mission, we collected audio recordings of crew members as they completed their assigned self-scheduling task using novel software. Conversation analysis provided insight about collaborative nature of task and potential new evaluation measures.

human computer interaction↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Facilitating Crew-Computer Collaboration During Mixed-Initiative Space Mission Planning

As NASA looks toward longer duration missions, there will inevitably be a stronger emphasis on crew autonomy, particularly in the domains of mission planning. Ensuring that astronauts, while subject to lengthy periods of communication delay with Earth-based mission support personnel, are able to independently adapt their schedules to rapidly changing environments is a critical aspect of deep-space exploration. This task will likely require the assistance of computer support systems, as the task of mission planning is complex and currently requires dedicated console operators. A mixed-initiative approach can help alleviate some of the more workload-heavy aspects of planning by offloading the intricate task of constraint management to a computer, while still allowing the crew member to maintain overall control of the plan. Playbook is a mission planning tool that has been developed specifically to support this type of mixed-initiative scheduling. This paper examines: 1) the operational evidence of the challenges and viability of autonomous crew planning, and 2) the novel scheduling capabilities in Playbook that are meant to address those findings.

human-computer interaction↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Crew Autonomy Through Self-Scheduling: Guidelines for Crew Scheduling Performance Envelope and Mitigation Strategies

NASA’s future long duration exploration missions (LDEMs) will encounter increasing communication transmission delays as they move farther from Earth-based ground stations. Because crews can no longer rely on real-time support from ground planners, they will have to self-schedule their own operational timelines effectively and efficiently. To enable this, our team develops Playbook, a mission planning and scheduling tool. Our research focuses on quantifying scheduling performance using Playbook to inform the design and development of future features aimed at streamlining timeline creation. We also aim to propose standards and guidelines for autonomous crews in LDEMs. This year, we discuss preliminary results from HERA Campaign 6.

self-scheduling↗