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At least 37 records · Page 2
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
NASA NTRS2010

The Evolution of Extravehicular Activity Operations to Lunar Exploration Based on Operational Lessons Learned During 2009 NASA Desert RATS Field Testing

This paper will present options to evolutionary changes in several philosophical areas of extravehicular activity (EVA) operations. These areas will include single person verses team EVAs; various loss of communications scenarios (with Mission Control, between suited crew, suited crew to rover crew, and rover crew A to rover crew B); EVA termination and abort time requirements; incapacitated crew ingress time requirements; autonomous crew operations during loss of signal periods including crew decisions on EVA execution (including decision for single verses team EVA). Additionally, suggestions as to the evolution of the make-up of the EVA flight control team from the current standard will be presented. With respect to the flight control team, the major areas of EVA flight control, EVA Systems and EVA Tasks, will be reviewed, and suggested evolutions of each will be presented. Currently both areas receive real-time information, and provide immediate feedback during EVAs as well as spacesuit (extravehicular mobility unit - EMU) maintenance and servicing periods. With respect to the tasks being performed, either EMU servicing and maintenance, or the specific EVA tasks, daily revising of plans will need to be able to be smoothly implemented to account for unforeseen situations and findings. Many of the presented ideas are a result of lessons learned by the NASA Johnson Space Center Mission Operations Directorate operations team support during the 2009 NASA Desert Research and Technology Studies (Desert RATS). It is important that the philosophy of both EVA crew operations and flight control be examined now, so that, where required, adjustments can be made to a next generation EMU and EVA equipment that will complement the anticipated needs of both the EVA flight control team and the crews.

Bell, Ernest R., Jr.↗
NASA NTRS2006

Constellation Operations: Lessons Learned For Future Exploration

The Earth science community has long advocated placing numerous instruments in space to study the Earth and its environment. Space agencies from many countries have responded to this call with a wide range of orbiting satellites. Scientists also envisioned placing some satellites in constellations, to enable diverse remote sensing instruments to observe the same part of the Earth (or its atmosphere) at about the same time, thereby increasing the opportunities for coincident science observations. The Earth Science Afternoon Constellation is answering this call, but there have been unique challenges on the way to its deployment. Currently, the Afternoon Constellation is to comprise six satellites. Three are currently on orbit: NASA's Earth Observing System (EOS)-Aqua (2002) and EOS-Aura (2004), and CNES's Polarization & Anisotropy of Reflectances for Atmospheric Sciences coupled with Observations from a Lidar (PARASOL) (2004). Two more satellites, the Cloud-Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observation (CALIPSO) and Cloudsat, are to be jointly launched in late 2005, followed by the Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) in 2008. The Afternoon Constellation is unlike most satellite constellations in that: 1) It is not a homogenous mix of identical satellites; rather it comprises several satellites with complementary observational capabilities; 2) The satellites are not spaced around the Earth to provide instantaneous, global coverage (as for a communications satellite constellation); rather they orbit in close proximity so observations occur at about the same time over approximately the same region; and 3) Lastly, the satellites are not managed and controlled by one organization; rather the list of organizations is diverse: CNES in France, NASA Centers at Goddard, Langley, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the US Air Force facility in New Mexico. The PARASOL launch and early orbit (L&EO) phase proved to be a learning experience for constellation members (including Constellation management). Prior to launch, all members signed an operations coordination document that spelled out basic requirements for keeping the constellation safe and resolving non-nominal events. Once PARASOL reached orbit and the mission teams gained experience using the newly-developed constellation monitoring tools, it became clear that some of the guidelines in the signed agreements had to be adjusted. This paper presents the L&EO lessons learned and how they were used to prepare for the next phase - the period following the CloudSat/CALIPSO launch.

Kelly, Angelita C.↗
NASA NTRS2000

Lessons Learned on Operating and Preparing Operations for a Technology Mission from the Perspective of the Earth Observing-1 Mission

The New Millennium Program's first Earth-observing mission (EO-1) is a technology validation mission. It is managed by the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland and is scheduled for launch in the summer of 2000. The purpose of this mission is to flight-validate revolutionary technologies that will contribute to the reduction of cost and increase of capabilities for future land imaging missions. In the EO-1 mission, there are five instrument, five spacecraft, and three supporting technologies to flight-validate during a year of operations. EO-1 operations and the accompanying ground system were intended to be simple in order to maintain low operational costs. For purposes of formulating operations, it was initially modeled as a small science mission. However, it quickly evolved into a more complex mission due to the difficulties in effectively integrating all of the validation plans of the individual technologies. As a consequence, more operational support was required to confidently complete the on-orbit validation of the new technologies. This paper will outline the issues and lessons learned applicable to future technology validation missions. Examples of some of these include the following: (1) operational complexity encountered in integrating all of the validation plans into a coherent operational plan, (2) initial desire to run single shift operations subsequently growing to 6 "around-the-clock" operations, (3) managing changes in the technologies that ultimately affected operations, (4) necessity for better team communications within the project to offset the effects of change on the Ground System Developers, Operations Engineers, Integration and Test Engineers, S/C Subsystem Engineers, and Scientists, and (5) the need for a more experienced Flight Operations Team to achieve the necessary operational flexibility. The discussion will conclude by providing several cost comparisons for developing operations from previous missions to EO-1 and discuss some details that might be done differently for future technology validation missions.

Mandl, Dan↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

OSIRIS-REx Earth Return & Entry: Navigation Operations & Lessons Learned

The Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security–Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) spacecraft successfully returned to Earth on September24, 2024, safely delivering its Sample Return Capsule (SRC) to the Utah Test and Training Range (UTTR). This paper describes the navigation operations that occurred between the departure from Bennu and the return of the SRC. An overview is given of the Flight Dynamics System (FDS) that includes tracking, orbit determination (OD), maneuver planning, and interfaces with entry, descent, and landing. Operational details on the SRC release criteria and conjunction assessment considerations are also provided. Lessons learned are presented that may help future sample return or interplanetary entry missions.

Kenneth M. Getzandanner↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Progress in Red vs. Green Propellant Operations: ASCENT Load Operations Lessons Learned

The Green Propellant Infusion Mission (GPIM) [1] is a NASA Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD) effort to establish via demonstration ASCENT propellant (Advanced Space Craft Energetic Non-Toxic propellant, formerly referred to as AF-M315E) ground operations through on –orbit performance. ASCENT was developed by Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) as an increased energy density, reduced toxicity and reduced hazard monopropellant formulation relative to hydrazine. The GPIM team was led by Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corporation (BATC) as Program Management and Principal Investigator with AFRL, Aerojet-Rocketdyne (AR), the United States Space Force Space and Missile Systems Center (USSF/SMC), NASA Glenn Research Center (GRC), NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), and NASA Kennedy Space Center (KSC) as Co-Investigators. The AFRL co-investigator role in the GPIM program was to develop the Propellant Ground Support Equipment (PGSE), associated Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) and Check Lists (CL), propellant load, propellant specification standard conventions and analysis methods, decontamination and waste disposal practices. This paper will discuss lessons learned in documentation, crew composition and readiness, equipment readiness, propellant readiness and potential improvements in the PGSE design.

Anthony P Zuttarelli↗
NASA NTRS2001

Using Model-Based Reasoning for Autonomous Instrument Operation - Lessons Learned From IMAGE/LENA

Model-based reasoning has been applied as an autonomous control strategy on the Low Energy Neutral Atom (LENA) instrument currently flying on board the Imager for Magnetosphere-to-Aurora Global Exploration (IMAGE) spacecraft. Explicit models of instrument subsystem responses have been constructed and are used to dynamically adapt the instrument to the spacecraft's environment. These functions are cast as part of a Virtual Principal Investigator (VPI) that autonomously monitors and controls the instrument. In the VPI's current implementation, LENA's command uplink volume has been decreased significantly from its previous volume; typically, no uplinks are required for operations. This work demonstrates that a model-based approach can be used to enhance science instrument effectiveness. The components of LENA are common in space science instrumentation, and lessons learned by modeling this system may be applied to other instruments. Future work involves the extension of these methods to cover more aspects of LENA operation and the generalization to other space science instrumentation.

Johnson, Michael A.↗
NASA NTRS2010

Operational Lessons Learned from NASA Analog Missions

National Aeronautics and Space Administration s (NASA) efforts in human space flight are currently focused on the Space Shuttle and International Space Station (ISS) programs, with efforts beginning on the future exploration opportunities. Both the Space Shuttle and ISS programs are important to the development of a capability for human exploration beyond Low Earth Orbit (LEO). The ISS provides extensive research capabilities to determine how the human body reacts to long duration stays in space. Also, the ISS and Shuttle can serve as a limited testbed for equipment or entire systems that may be used on missions to the Moon, Mars, or to a near-Earth asteroid. It has been nearly 35 years since the Apollo astronauts visited the Moon. Future space explorers will have to re-learn how to work and live on planetary surfaces, and how to do that for extended periods of time. Exploration crews will perform a wide assortment of scientific tasks, including material sampling and emplacement of automated instruments. Surface mission operations include the activities of the crew living and working, mission support from the Earth, and the operation of robotic and other remotely commanded equipment on the surface and in planetary orbit. Other surface activities will include the following: exploring areas surrounding a habitat; using rovers to collect rock and soil samples; setting up experiments on the surface to monitor the radiation environment and any seismic or thermal activity; and conducting scientific analyses and experiments inside a habitat laboratory. Of course, the astronauts will also have to spend some of their surface time "doing chores" and maintaining their habitat and other systems. In preparation for future planetary exploration, NASA must design the answers to many operational questions. What will the astronauts do on the surface? How will they accomplish this? What tools will they require for their tasks? How will robots and astronauts work together? What vehicle and system capabilities are required to support the activities? How will the crew and the Earth-based mission control team interact? During the initial phases of manned planetary exploration, one challenge in particular is virtually the same as during the Apollo program: How can scientific return be maximized during a relatively short surface mission? Today, NASA is investigating solutions to these challenges by conducting analog missions. These Earth-based missions possess characteristics that are analogous to missions on the Moon or Mars. These missions are excellent for testing operational concepts, and the design, configuration, and functionality of spacesuits, robots, rovers, and habitats. Analog mission crews test specific techniques and procedures for surface field geology, biological sample collection, and planetary protection. The process of actually working an analog mission reveals a myriad of small details, which either contribute to or impede efficient operations, many of which would never have been thought about otherwise. It also helps to define the suite of tools, containers, and other small equipment that surface explorers will use. This paper focuses on how analog missions have addressed selected operational considerations for future planetary missions.

Arnold, Larissa S.↗
NASA NTRS2005

Diet as a factor in behavioral radiation protection following exposure to heavy particles

Major risks associated with radiation exposures on deep space missions include carcinogenesis due to heavy-particle exposure of cancer-prone tissues and performance decrements due to neurological damage produced by heavy particles. Because exposure to heavy particles can cause oxidative stress, it is possible that antioxidants can be used to mitigate these risks (and possibly some health risks of microgravity). To assess the capacity of antioxidant diets to mitigate the effects of exposure to heavy particles, rats were maintained on antioxidant diets containing 2% blueberry or strawberry extract or a control diet for 8 weeks prior to exposure to 1.5 or 2.0 Gy of accelerated iron particles at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Following irradiation rats were tested on a series of behavioral tasks: amphetamine-induced taste aversion learning, operant responding and spatial learning and memory. The results indicated that the performance of the irradiated rats maintained on the antioxidant diets was, in general, significantly better than that of the control animals, although the effectiveness of the diets ameliorating the radiation-induced deterioration in performance varied as a function of both the specific diet and the specific endpoint. In addition, animals fed antioxidant diets prior to exposure showed reduced heavy particle-induced tumorigenesis one year after exposure compared to the animals fed the control diet. These results suggest that antioxidant diets have the potential to serve as part of a system designed to provide protection to astronauts against the effects of heavy particles on exploratory missions outside the magnetic field of the earth.

Non-NASA Center↗
NASA NTRS2012

Antarctic Exploration Parallels for Future Human Planetary Exploration: Science Operations Lessons Learned, Planning, and Equipment Capabilities for Long Range, Long Duration Traverses

The purpose for this workshop can be summed up by the question: Are there relevant analogs to planetary (meaning the Moon and Mars) to be found in polar exploration on Earth? The answer in my opinion is yes or else there would be no reason for this workshop. However, I think some background information would be useful to provide a context for my opinion on this matter. As all of you are probably aware, NASA has been set on a path that, in its current form, will eventually lead to putting human crews on the surface of the Moon and Mars for extended (months to years) in duration. For the past 50 V 60 years, starting not long after the end of World War II, exploration of the Antarctic has accumulated a significant body of experience that is highly analogous to our anticipated activities on the Moon and Mars. This relevant experience base includes: h Long duration (1 year and 2 year) continuous deployments by single crews, h Established a substantial outpost with a single deployment event to support these crews, h Carried out long distance (100 to 1000 kilometer) traverses, with and without intermediate support h Equipment and processes evolved based on lessons learned h International cooperative missions This is not a new or original thought; many people within NASA, including the most recent two NASA Administrators, have commented on the recognizable parallels between exploration in the Antarctic and on the Moon or Mars. But given that level of recognition, relatively little has been done, that I am aware of, to encourage these two exploration communities to collaborate in a significant way. [Slide 4] I will return to NASA s plans and the parallels with Antarctic traverses in a moment, but I want to spend a moment to explain the objective of this workshop and the anticipated products. We have two full days set aside for this workshop. This first day will be taken up with a series of presentations prepared by individuals with experience that extends back as far as the late 1940s and includes contemporary experience. The people presenting bring a variety of points of view, including not only U.S. but international, although most, if not all, have collaborated on international teams. The second day will consist of a series of small focused group interactions centered on those elements likely to be needed for traverse missions, such as mobility, habitation, and extravehicular activity (EVA, aka space suits). Our invited participants will be talking with people that specialize in these elements so that we can foster more direct interaction and exchange of experiences between these two exploration communities. After the workshop we will be preparing a report documenting these presentations and the essence of the focused interactions.

Hoffman, Stephen J.↗
NASA NTRS2011

Flight Dynamics Operations: Methods and Lessons Learned from Space Shuttle Orbit Operations

The Flight Dynamics Officer is responsible for trajectory maintenance of the Space Shuttle. This paper will cover high level operational considerations, methodology, procedures, and lessons learned involved in performing the functions of orbit and rendezvous Flight Dynamics Officer and leading the team of flight dynamics specialists during different phases of flight. The primary functions that will be address are: onboard state vector maintenance, ground ephemeris maintenance, calculation of ground and spacecraft acquisitions, collision avoidance, burn targeting for the primary mission, rendezvous, deorbit and contingencies, separation sequences, emergency deorbit preparation, mass properties coordination, payload deployment planning, coordination with the International Space Station, and coordination with worldwide trajectory customers. Each of these tasks require the Flight Dynamics Officer to have cognizance of the current trajectory state as well as the impact of future events on the trajectory plan in order to properly analyze and react to real-time changes. Additionally, considerations are made to prepare flexible alternative trajectory plans in the case timeline changes or a systems failure impact the primary plan. The evolution of the methodology, procedures, and techniques used by the Flight Dynamics Officer to perform these tasks will be discussed. Particular attention will be given to how specific Space Shuttle mission and training simulation experiences, particularly off-nominal or unexpected events such as shortened mission durations, tank failures, contingency deorbit, navigation errors, conjunctions, and unexpected payload deployments, have influenced the operational procedures and training for performing Space Shuttle flight dynamics operations over the history of the program. These lessons learned can then be extended to future vehicle trajectory operations.

Cutri-Kohart, Rebecca M.↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Lessons Learned in Hydrogen System Operation

NASA has learned extensive lessons on the operations of hydrogen systems during the developments and operations of space hardware. A subset of these lessons that are useful for aircraft and terrestrial applications using liquid hydrogen are presented to help disseminate the information learned. Discussion includes test data, analysis, and observations on cryogenic insulation systems, stratification and temperature gradients within tank systems, fittings to reduce leakage, and integration of refrigeration systems within a cryogenic fluids system.

Liquid Hydrogen↗
NASA NTRS1987

A learning controller for nonrepetitive robotic operation

A practical learning control system is described which is applicable to complex robotic and telerobotic systems involving multiple feedback sensors and multiple command variables. In the controller, the learning algorithm is used to learn to reproduce the nonlinear relationship between the sensor outputs and the system command variables over particular regions of the system state space, rather than learning the actuator commands required to perform a specific task. The learned information is used to predict the command signals required to produce desired changes in the sensor outputs. The desired sensor output changes may result from automatic trajectory planning or may be derived from interactive input from a human operator. The learning controller requires no a priori knowledge of the relationships between the sensor outputs and the command variables. The algorithm is well suited for real time implementation, requiring only fixed point addition and logical operations. The results of learning experiments using a General Electric P-5 manipulator interfaced to a VAX-11/730 computer are presented. These experiments involved interactive operator control, via joysticks, of the position and orientation of an object in the field of view of a video camera mounted on the end of the robot arm.

Miller, W. T., III↗
NASA NTRS2012

Particle Filtering for Model-Based Anomaly Detection in Sensor Networks

A novel technique has been developed for anomaly detection of rocket engine test stand (RETS) data. The objective was to develop a system that postprocesses a csv file containing the sensor readings and activities (time-series) from a rocket engine test, and detects any anomalies that might have occurred during the test. The output consists of the names of the sensors that show anomalous behavior, and the start and end time of each anomaly. In order to reduce the involvement of domain experts significantly, several data-driven approaches have been proposed where models are automatically acquired from the data, thus bypassing the cost and effort of building system models. Many supervised learning methods can efficiently learn operational and fault models, given large amounts of both nominal and fault data. However, for domains such as RETS data, the amount of anomalous data that is actually available is relatively small, making most supervised learning methods rather ineffective, and in general met with limited success in anomaly detection. The fundamental problem with existing approaches is that they assume that the data are iid, i.e., independent and identically distributed, which is violated in typical RETS data. None of these techniques naturally exploit the temporal information inherent in time series data from the sensor networks. There are correlations among the sensor readings, not only at the same time, but also across time. However, these approaches have not explicitly identified and exploited such correlations. Given these limitations of model-free methods, there has been renewed interest in model-based methods, specifically graphical methods that explicitly reason temporally. The Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) in a Linear Dynamic System approach assumes that the multi-dimensional test data is a mixture of multi-variate Gaussians, and fits a given number of Gaussian clusters with the help of the wellknown Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm. The parameters thus learned are used for calculating the joint distribution of the observations. However, this GMM assumption is essentially an approximation and signals the potential viability of non-parametric density estimators. This is the key idea underlying the new approach.

Solano, Wanda↗
NASA NTRS2001

Satellite Ground Operations Automation: Lessons Learned and Future Approaches

Reducing spacecraft ground system operations costs is a major goal in all missions. The Fast Auroral Snapshot (FAST) flight operations team at the NASA/Goddard Spacecraft Flight Center developed in-house scripts and procedures to automate monitoring of critical spacecraft functions. The initial staffing profile of 16x7 was reduced first to 8x5 and then to 'lights out'. Operations functions became an offline review of system performance and the generation of future science plans for subsequent upload to the spacecraft. Lessons learned will be applied to the challenging Triana mission, where 24x7 contact with the spacecraft will be necessary at all times.

Catena, John↗