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NASA NTRS2019

Recommendation for a Medical System Concept of Operations for Gateway Missions

NASA’s exploration missions to cis-lunar space will establish a permanent gateway to future transport missions to Mars. These missions mandate a significant paradigm change for mission planning, spacecraft design, human systems integration, and in-flight medical care due to constraints on mass, volume, power, resupply, and medical evacuation capability. These constraints require medical system development to be tightly integrated with mission and habitat design to provide a sufficient medical infrastructure and enable mission success. This concept of operations provides a vision of medical care needs that will be used to guide the development of a medical system for the cis-lunar Gateway Habitat. This medical system will serve as the precursor to what is implemented in future exploration missions to Mars. This concept of operations documents an overview of the stakeholder needs and system goals of a medical system and provides examples of the types of activities for which the system will be used during the mission. This concept of operations informs the ExMC systems engineering effort to define the Gateway Habitat Medical System by documenting the medical activities and capabilities relevant to Gateway missions, as identified by the ExMC clinician community. In addition, this concept of operations will inform the subsequent systems engineering process of developing technical requirements, system architectures, interfaces, and verification and validation approaches for the medical system. This document supports the closure of ExMC Gap Med01: We do not have a concept of operations for medical care during exploration missions, corresponding to the ExMC-managed human system risk: Risk of Adverse Health Outcomes & Decrements in Performance due to Inflight Medical Conditions.

Rubin, David↗

NASA NTRS2019

Advancing Aircraft Operations in a Net-Centric Environment with the Incorporation of Increasingly Autonomous Systems and Human Teaming

NextGen has begun the modernization of the nation’s air transportation system, with goals to improve system safety, increase operation efficiency and capacity, provide enhanced predictability, resilience and robustness. With these improvements, NextGen is poised to handle significant increases in air traffic operations, more than twice the number recorded in 2016, by 2025.1 NextGen is evolving toward collaborative decision-making across many agents, including automation, by use of a Net-Centric architecture, which in itself creates a very complex environment in which the navigation and operation of aircraft are to take place. An intricate environment such as this, coupled with the expected upsurge of air traffic operations generates concern respecting the ability of the human-agent to both fly and manage aircraft within. Therefore, it is both necessary and practical to begin the process of increasingly autonomous systems within the cockpit that will act independently to assist the human-agent achieve the overall goal of NextGen. However, the straightforward technological development and implementation of intelligent machines into the cockpit is only part of what is necessary to maintain, at minimum, or improve human-agent functionality, as desired, while operating in NextGen. The full integration of Increasingly Autonomous Systems (IAS) within the cockpit can only be accomplished when the IAS works in concert with the human, formulating trust between the two, thereby establishing a team atmosphere. Imperative to cockpit implementation is ensuring the proper performance of the IAS by the development team and the human-agent with which it will be paired when given a specific piloting, navigation, or observational task. Described in this paper are the steps taken, at NASA Langley Research Center, during the second and third phases of the development of an IAS, the Traffic Data Manager (TDM), its verification and validation by human-agents, and the foundational development of Human Autonomy Teaming (HAT) between the two.

Houston, Vincent E.↗

NASA NTRS2020

Evaluation of Performance, Fatigue and Workload during Real-time, Reactive Telerobotic Mission Control Operations

Telerobotic operations involve a user operating a robot from a different location from where the activity is taking place. It can be difficult for humans to maintain performance when faced with physiological stressors, such as fatigue or illness. Operations require vigilance for extended periods, raising safety concerns surrounding operator’s fatigue and workload. Every hour of wakefulness increases the drive to sleep, causing decreased reaction time (RT), increased lapses in attention (RT > 500 ms), and decreased memory capability. The NASA Task Load Index (NASA-TLX) was created to evaluate the multiple attributes surrounding workload (e.g., mental and physical demands). The upcoming Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) mission involves remotely controlling a lunar vehicle from an Earth-based mission control station. The goal of VIPER is to excavate the moon for volatiles (water) deep in the surface near the South Pole for a 100-day, continuous operation.

Fatigue↗

NASA NTRS2020

In-time System-wide Safety Assurance (ISSA) Concept of Operations and Design Considerations for Urban Air Mobility (UAM)

Emerging operations involving Advanced Air Mobility (AAM), such as Urban Air Mobility (UAM), pose a challenge to safety assurance and to accessibility within the National Airspace System (NAS).In particular, the public has a low tolerance for risk in aviation and the current NAS tends to be labor-intensive with limited ability to scale up for UAM. In response to this landscape, NASA is collaborating with industry to define a Concept of Operations (ConOps) for In-time System-Wide Safety Assurance (ISSA) for scalable UAM involving a service-oriented architecture. This architecture focuses safety investments for technological solutions that can overcome safety related barriers for emerging operations. By working with industry, consensus can be reached on desirable system traits that are based on integration and fusion of data and leverage increasingly autonomous and automated systems. These complex systems can identify anomalies, precursors, and trends that together enable more proactive management of operational risks. AAM and UAM elevate the need for risk management in relation to increasing density and heterogeneity of vehicles and operations. Whereas safety in today’s NAS is built on a history of programs and technologies that react to incidents and accidents, AAM presents an opportunity to leverage that experience and its implications and proactively integrate safety into the earliest designs of vehicles and systems. In a perfect world AAM and UAM would not be inherently dangerous but until then ensuring the highest quality of safety requirements is the bridge to mitigating risks.

In-Time System-Wide Safety Assurance↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Lessons Learned: Using UTM paradigm for Urban Air Mobility Operations

Urban Air Mobility (UAM) aims to reduce congestion on the roads and highways by offering air taxi as an alternative to driving on surface roads. Integration of UAM operations in the National Airspace System (NAS) has been the focus of the research conducted at NASA Ames Research Center. A simulation was performed in collaboration with Uber Technologies Inc to investigate if NASA’s UTM architecture and its implementation as demonstrated in the 2019 UTM field tests were extensible for UAM operations, and if the data exchange between multiple operators as planned under UTM were adequate for UAM operations in the shared airspace. In order to explore these research questions, three Use Cases were defined to investigate different airspace management challenges. This paper will describe the lessons learned from exercising the uses cases and the airspace management services including scheduling and separation developed to facilitate initial UAM operations.

Urban Air Mobility↗

NASA NTRS2018

Radio-hosted Flight / Ground Interface for Operations Standardization

The interface between a spacecraft and its ground operations segment includes the flow of commands, configuration, and sequencing elements to the spacecraft, and the flow of telemetry and data products from the spacecraft. Creating and implementing a complete definition of this interface simplifies and standardizes mission operations, allowing easy sharing of operations personnel across missions. Early spacecraft featured a simple flight / ground interface (FGI) using hardware command decoding in the radio, driven by technological limitations of the time. Modern spacecraft use command and data handling (CDH) avionics on which flight software executes, which in turn controls and configures the mission, executes subsystem and instrument instructions, and implements critical fault protection actions. Deep space missions feature advanced operations software for running sequenced activities over a period of weeks, which allows them to function with only infrequent ground contact. This approach comes at the cost of increased complexity in the FGI, requiring expensive modifications to heritage flight software and ground systems. By hosting the interface in the radio instead of the CDH avionics, modern missions can approximate the FGI design simplicity of early spacecraft, with significant advantages for vendor competition, lowered costs, standardization of operations, and reduction of implementation risk.

Lock, Patricia D.↗

NASA NTRS2018

Towards Design Principles for Visual Analytics in Operations Contexts

Operations engineering teams interact with complex data systems to make technical decisions that ensure the operational efﬁcacy of their missions. To support these decision-making tasks, which may require elastic prioritization of goals dependent on changing conditions, custom analytics tools are often developed. We were asked to develop such a tool by a team at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where rover telecom operators make decisions based on models predicting how much data rovers can transfer from the surface of Mars. Through research, design, implementation, and informal evaluation of our new tool, we developed principles to inform the design of visual analytics systems in operations contexts. We offer these principles as a step towards understanding the complex task of designing these systems. The principles we present are applicable to designers and developers tasked with building analytics systems in domains that face complex operations challenges such as scheduling, routing, and logistics.

Lombeyda, Santiago↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Reports of Resilient Performance: Investigating Operators' Descriptions of Safety-producing Behaviors in the Aviation Safety Reporting System

While many existing taxonomies and frameworks provide a common vocabulary for describing how human operators fail in the context of sociotechnical systems, at present, there is no common vocabulary to describe how humans succeed. Such a framework would facilitate systematically collecting and analyzing data on how human performance can produce safety, not just how it can reduce safety. One potentially rich source of currently available information for exploring desired performance is the reports submitted to NASA’s Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS). These de-identified, confidential, and voluntary narrative reports are submitted by pilots, controllers, ground operators, and others within aviation operations. While these reports are primarily submitted to describe safety risks, incidents, and problems, they also often describe how those risks were mitigated, and provide a window into aspects of everyday work in aviation. This paper describes an analysis of ASRS narratives to understand how operators talk about their own resilient behaviors during adverse safety conditions and events. Guided by Erik Hollnagel’s Resilience Assessment Grid framework (i.e., anticipate, monitor, respond, learn), we illustrate our approach and methodology with examples from reports. We also highlight some of the challenges and how further research is needed in developing a taxonomy of operators’ descriptions of resilient performance.

resilient behaviors↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Community Noise Assessment of Urban Air Mobility Vehicle Operations using the FAA Aviation Environmental Design Tool

In contrast to most commercial air traffic today, vehicles serving the urban air mobility (UAM) market are anticipated to operate in communities close to the public at large. The approved model for assessing environmental impact of air traffic actions in the United States, the Federal Aviation Administration’s Aviation Environmental Design Tool (AEDT), does not support analysis of such operations due to a combined lack of a UAM aircraft performance model and aircraft noise data. This paper discusses the initial development of a method to assess the acoustic impact of UAM fleet operations on the community using AEDT and demonstrates its use for representative UAM operations. In particular, methods were developed using fixed-point flight profiles and user-supplied noise data in a manner that avoids unwanted behavior in AEDT. A set of 32 routes in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area were assessed for single and multiple (fleet) operations for two concept vehicles.

urban air mobility↗

NASA NTRS2020

MER Opportunity dust-storm recovery operations and implications for future Mars surface missions

In June 2018, NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity became engulfed in the most intense global dust storm observed in its 14-year mission and in Mars’ recorded history. Sapped of life-giving solar energy, Opportunity fell silent to ground operators on June 11, in what would be its final call home. Over the course of the next eight months, the MER team employed numerous recovery efforts and radiated over one thousand commands to wake the silent rover. Although unsuccessful, MER’s dust-storm recovery team changed the paradigm of dust-storm operations from Opportunity’s survival of a previous global dust storm in 2007. In this paper, the authors offer a glimpse into MER’s recovery efforts and lessons learned from Opportunity dust-storm operations for future solar-powered Mars surface missions. In the first section, the authors discuss the indicators of the approaching dust storm and the actions the team employed to reduce Opportunity’s power consumption and preserve available battery charge prior to loss of contact. The second section discusses the team’s recovery efforts until Opportunity’s declared End-of-Mission, the steps the team took to re-establish contact with Opportunity, the assumptions made during each step of the recovery process, and the commanding actions employed. Finally, the authors discuss the operational impacts of global dust storms on the safe and successful operation of solar-powered spacecraft on the Martian surface, and offer design recommendations for future solar-powered missions from the lessons learned during Opportunity’s 14-year mission and experience through two global dust storms.

Nelson, Robert W.↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Community Noise Assessment of Urban Air Mobility Vehicle Operations using the FAA Aviation Environmental Design Tool

urban air mobility↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Behavioral Health and Performance Operations and Research in Human Spaceflight

There are two distinct functions of the Behavioral Health and Performance (BHP) specialists at NASA Johnson Space Center (JSC), with a shared goal of promoting optimal performance during all mission phases, beginning with selection to the NASA Astronaut Corps through training for and completing a spaceflight mission. The BHP Operations team is active in areas such as selection, training, routine behavioral healthcare services, and work-rest schedule. The BHP Laboratory is engaged in research in space and analog platforms to address the risks and other challenges associated with future deep space missions. Their research focuses on topics that align with the NASA Human Research Program’s Human Factors Behavioral Performance Element goals. This panel will provide details of recent work by BHP Operations and the BHP Laboratory at NASA JSC, and will demonstrate their shared goals, and contributions toward, optimizing performance and maintaining the behavioral health and well-being of astronauts during all mission phases.In 2020-2021, NASA engaged another astronaut applicant screening process to identify its 23rd group of astronaut candidates. The BHP Operations team completed a significant amount of work to evaluate applicants and provide valuable input to the Astronaut Selection Board and the Aerospace Medical Board. One presentation will provide an overview of the work completed by BHP; and one presentation will discuss a critical competency important for successful job performance of the astronauts – Team Orientation. The former will summarize aspects of BHP’s Select-in and Select-out process and provide lessons learned for future selection cycles; the latter will briefly discuss the competencies of BHP’s applicant screening work, with focus on the importance of Team Orientation and the challenges of its measure. A third presentation will provide an overview of BHP’s current fatigue management work with astronauts and mission-critical operators at JSC (e.g., flight directors, pilots), and provide a look at the direction these fatigue management services may take in future exploration missions. Two other presentations will focus on the research completed by the BHP Lab to measure in a standardized way the critical aspects of behavioral health and well-being. One of the presentations will provide an overview of the Exploration Measures being collected during all space and analog missions, and the importance these objective measures have for future research and operations. The final presentation will summarize analyses completed with these measures, as they have been harmonized across both ISS and Analog missions.

Gary Beven↗

NASA NTRS2021

Small-Body Proximity Operations & TAG: Navigation Experiences & Lessons Learned from the OSIRIS-REx Mission

On October 20th, 2020, the nearly two-year proximity operations campaign for the Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security–Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx)mission at the near-Earth asteroid (101955) Bennu culminated in a successful Touch-and-Go (TAG) sample collection event. Navigation performance was a significant driver for flight activities at Bennu, which consisted of multiple phases geared towards characterizing the asteroid, selecting a sample site, and safely guiding the spacecraft to and from the surface in order to collect at least 60 g of pristine regolith. The entire operations team gained a tremendous amount of experience operating in the challenging small body environment and overcame many challenges. In this paper, we summarize navigation-focused experiences and lessons learned from OSIRIS-REx proximity operations at Bennu that are applicable to future missions to small asteroids, comets, and planetary moons. Areas of focus include staffing and organization, ground system infrastructure, mission phase planning, navigation operations, and spacecraft and payload considerations.

Kenneth M. Getzandanner↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

DAA Use Case for Auto Cargo m:N Operations

A detect and avoid use-case was developed to highlight detect and avoid issues associated with m:N operations in the auto cargo domain. This work is being done in conjunction with industry partners and developed for the Operational Scenario and Environmental Description (OSED) for RTCA SC-228. The detect and avoid function is critical, required technology for unmanned aircraft to operation in the national airspace. RTCA SC-228 has published MOPS (phase 1 & 2) detailing the requirements and methods of compliance. This work will help address additional operational aspects of how/when DAA will be employed by unmanned systems. Specifically, this work focuses on “auto cargo” operations. Auto cargo, in this context, refers to regularly scheduled cargo-size aircraft that are flown remotely. The Remote Pilot In Command (RPIC), in this case, is responsible for multiple aircraft, flown simultaneously. The use-case details the use of DAA in this context, the potential issues and gaps that exist.

multi-vehicle control↗

NASA NTRS2020

Select Electronic Parts Operation at Extreme Low Temperature

The purpose of the study presented in this paper is to extend the test period of a selected set of electronics parts at cryogenic condition to dwell period of about 24 hours to demonstrate extreme cold operational capability of these components. The parts tested are tantalum polymer, BX and P90 type ceramic capacitors, thick film resistors, analog multiplexers, a digital inverter, and a D-flip-flop. These parts were tested to assist identifying candidate components that can be used for development of a cold capable telemetry board. There are several past investigations that have shown that COTS (commercial-off-the-shelf) capacitors and resistors tested at cryogenic temperatures and frequencies up to 10MHz did not exhibit significant changes in capacitance and resistance values. Also, there are several test results for active parts. These past tests collected measurements during a temperature sweep from room temperature down to cryogenic temperature with very short dwell time at cryogenic temperature, and back to room temperature. This study extends the operational dwell time to at least 24 hours and returning to room temperature operation without significant degradation in performance, thus, demonstrating the potential for longer dwell time in actual operation in these extreme cold temperatures and a method for identifying the cold operability.

Ashtijou, Mohammad↗

NASA NTRS2021

Commanding Curiosity from the Couch: MSL Remote Operations, Challenges, and Path Ahead

This paper describes how the Mars ScienceLaboratory (MSL) project prepared for and successfully beganCuriosity rover Mars operations from their homes in responseto the COVID-19 work-from-home orders. In a very shortperiod, the team developed procedures and executed a remoteoperations readiness test in parallel with the team's support fornominal operations. Continuing regular rover operations withan entirely remote team had not previously been consideredfeasible due to a variety of factors. These included both thehuman factors, such as multiple concurrent person-to-personinteractions of the uplink planning team, as well as technicalfactors, such as reliance on powerful workstations dedicated tographically intensive software tools used for planning. The testwas conducted on March 12th, with both the downlink anduplink teams successfully simulating a near full planning day.The JPL administration announced the transition to mandatorytelework on Monday, March 16th. MSL stood down the uplinkplanning originally scheduled for the next day while downlinkcontinued monitoring the rover. Full operations then resumedper schedule with nearly the entire operations team teleworkingon Friday, March 20th, during which the team planned roveractivities for three Martian days (sols). These activities includedthe successful drilling of the "Edinburgh" rock target, a highlycomplex contact science activity.As of October 1st, 2020, the Mars Science Laboratory missionoperations team has conducted 88 remote tactical uplink shiftsfor a total of 190 sols of planned rover activity, which accountsfor more than 6% of the mission to date. In this period the roverhas completed four drilling campaigns and driven over 1150meters towards its next major science target – a sulfate bearinggeologic unit at the foot of Mount Sharp. Success has not beenwithout its challenges. Many of these have been addressed whileothers will remain in some form until the team can safely returnto JPL, which in turn is the largest challenge for the future.

Stroupe, Ashley↗

NASA NTRS2021

High operating temperature T2SL digital focal plane arrays for earth remote sensing instruments

In this presentation, we will report our recent efforts in achieving high performance in Antimonides type-II superlattice (T2SL) based infrared photodetectors using the barrier infrared detector (BIRD) architecture. The high operating temperature (HOT) BIRD focal plane arrays (FPAs) offer the same high performance, uniformity, operability, manufacturability, and affordability advantages as InSb. However, mid-wavelength infrared (MWIR) HOT-BIRD FPAs can operate at significantly higher temperatures (>150K) than InSb FPAs (typically 80K). Moreover, while InSb has a fixed cutoff wavelength (~5.4 µm), the HOT-BIRD offers a continuous adjustable cutoff wavelength, ranging from ~4 µm to >15 µm, and is therefore also suitable for long wavelength infrared (LWIR) as well. The LWIR detectors based on the BIRD architecture has also demonstrated significant operating temperature advantages over those based on traditional p-n junction designs. Two 6U SmalSat missions CIRAS (Cubesat Infrared Atmospheric Sounder) and HyTI (Hyperspectral Thermal Imager) are based on JPL’s T2SL BIRD focal plane arrays (FPAs). Based on III-V compound semiconductors, the BIRD FPAs offer a breakthrough solution for the realization of low cost (high yield), high-performance FPAs with excellent uniformity and pixel-to-pixel operability. We have also exploring the possibilities of integrating either metasurface resonator cavity or metasurface based flatlens with individual pixels to improve the signal-to-noise ratio of the detectors. Furthermore, we will discuss the advantages of the utilization of all digital read out integrated circuits with HOT-BIRDs.

Ghuman, and Parminder↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

A Remote, Human-in-the-Loop Evaluation of a Multiple-Drone Delivery Operation

Over time, advances in unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) have enabled a shift in the operational paradigm from one operator managing one aircraft to that of multiple operators working together to manage multiple aircraft. This shift has highlighted the need for effective human-autonomy teaming methods to maintain manageable workload levels for operators as well as high standards of system performance and safety. This paper presents a study aimed at evaluating whether automation can help operators manage workload during small UAS (sUAS) package delivery scenarios featuring contingency situations. These contingency situations, resulting from unplanned UAS Volume Reservations (UVRs), required flight path reroutes for multiple aircraft simultaneously. The study manipulated the number of aircraft affected by the UVRs and the level of automation support. The presence of terrain conflicts was also controlled within each scenario. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, subjects were not able to gain direct access to the Ground Control System (GCS). Therefore, the study was conducted using a subject-surrogate paradigm that required subjects to relay commands through a verbal protocol from remote locations outside of the lab to a researcher surrogate who had direct control of the GCS interfaces at the lab location. Results show that the automated support condition was associated with faster reroute response times, more efficient reroute maneuvers, and significantly lower levels of perceived workload than the manual reroute condition. However, the automation support level did not significantly impact pilots’ ability to avoid the UVR successfully; pilots were overwhelmingly capable of avoiding the UVR in all conditions. The presence of terrain conflicts primarily impacted pilot performance by leading to multiple uploads per vehicle, which was not typically required when pilots only needed to maneuver laterally. Although subjects did not have direct control over the GCS, subjective ratings indicate that the displays under test provided them with sufficient information to manage their aircraft and promptly respond to the unplanned UVRs. Overall, the objective and subjective data strongly suggest that the verbal protocol and subject-surrogate paradigm were effective methods for collecting data remotely amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

multi-UAS↗