Task Officer
Through our Spring research, we identified four key insights centered around the EVA Planner's experience as they plan, execute, and adapt EVA operations. As we move into the design phase of this project, we will prototype tool that will not only surface relevant geospatial and temporal constraints, but do so in a way that addresses emotional needs described in these insights.
We found that astronauts and EVA Planners have contrasting understandings of the map and environment. While astronauts rely on their personal observations and sensory inputs to navigate their surroundings, EVA Planners rely on technical data to create understandings of the astronaut’s environment.
In addition to this difficulty, unexpected changes in the crew's location or movements can also arise due to changes in mission objectives, obstacles, or technical issues. In such situations, the EVA Planner must quickly adapt and adjust the plan to ensure the safety of the crew and the achievement of mission objectives.
“It is confusing. [Astronauts] describe things and they say they are at certain places but it is really hard to judge where they are.” - NASA Flight Controller
EVA Planners use a variety of different tools in their workflow, doing scratch work in tools like Excel or utilizing pen and paper. Others in MCC are unable to see the individual work that was done, which leads to work not being properly documented.
“No one shares that [margin] with anyone. It's a worker-imposed value that they generate, based on reading how the crew are doing where they think they are in the timeline, what they think could still be done, given the amount of time left ... it's an invisible calculation that's happening that shapes how they're making decisions”
- NASA Research Engineer
Based on our interviews with NASA experts, we found that the process of adapting plans is non-linear in nature. There are extensive discussions that take place, with ideas going back and forth, before a final plan is agreed upon and implemented. In this process, we learned that EVA Planners often have to justify their work to ensure the validity of their reasoning.
To help us get started, our contacts at NASA’s Ames Research Center, provided a variety of literature on EVAs. At the beginning of the week, we knew very little about space — other than it being huge and unexplored. After dividing and conquering NASA’s research papers, we began to piece together the current state of EVAs.
From there, we expanded our research base and dove headfirst into the problem. With NASA literature, it's like drinking out of a firehose. Good thing there's five of us!
"The EVA work domain, as it exists today under real-time communications, exhibits a dependent relationship between extravehicular crew and the mission control center" - Research Engineer
“I think we can do it in amount of time we have, but we gotta go right now, we can’t waste time talking about it and have to do it right now” - Flight Controller
One of the most exciting opportunities we had with this project was the ability to interview actual astronauts, flight controllers, and NASA engineers. Through these interviews, we were able to gain first-hand insights into how decisions were being made during EVAs.
The following are our findings:
Visually displaying potential consequences help flight controllers [EVA Planners] accurately comprehend the effects of their decisions when geospatial and temporal constraints are changing.
While EVA Planners have the most expertise regarding the EVA timeline, it is important that they provide transparent justifications of their decisions. NASA Flight Controller
EVA Planners are spending valuable time performing mundane calculations when they could be focusing their mental bandwidth on problem-solving.
Our team needed to bring fresh perspectives into this huge problem space and selected professionals in analogous domains who face dynamic time and location constraints. Each interview was tailored to draw parallel findings to real-time, high-stakes planning that EVA Planners experience.
Here are the domains we interviewed:
"Part of ... establishing that trust is being able to articulate what you are responsible for and what you’ll do in case of certain emergency" - EMT
To immerse ourselves in the problem space, we paid a visit to the Moonshot Museum and met with the IRIS rover team in the CMU Robotics Institute. We were surprised to learn about the significant and ongoing contributions that Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon have made to space exploration.
Since there is no way for us to experience an actually lunar EVA, we simulated our own EVA planning and execution on Craig Street and Schenley Park. Mission Control remained in our office while Astronauts were driven and dropped off at their “hab” at Schenley Park. From their Hab, the Astronauts embarked on a mission through the park by completing “tasks” outlined by an EVA timeline, navigating the terrain, and keeping an eye on their consumables. Meanwhile, Mission Control acted in a supporting role by updating the timeline, maintaining crew safety, and solving problems.
"I literally never knew where you were!"
- Michael
Something both teams realized very quickly was that it is extremely difficult to pinpoint a person’s position on the map with only verbal communication. This is a challenge that we expected; upcoming Lunar EVAs on the south pole will face a similar limitation. As a subject matter expert we interviewed said: “I think the flight controller, hopefully in the near term Artemis missions … can have a dot on the map.” But for now, audio communication is all we really get. And having experienced it, it is very, very hard.
We learned that:
Given our findings, we obtained a fresh outlook and believed we were prepared to reconnect with our flight controller to obtain further information. In order to facilitate the conversations effectively, we produced a series of storyboards that depicted potential scenarios for our contact to respond to.
After validating user needs and risks, we used similar scenarios to validate that our ideas were technically feasible.
