National Aeronautics and Space Administration
Small Business Innovation Research 2002 Program Solicitations

TOPIC H6 Human Exploration and Expeditions

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H6.01 Crew Training and On-Board Crew Support
H6.02 Distributed/International Ground Operations

The goals of this topic include working collaboratively with technology developments in the Space Science Enterprise (and other organizations) to enable future human exploration missions to effectively address -- and at a fundamental level -- the "grand" science challenges facing NASA, driving down the cost of human exploration missions and campaigns beyond Earth orbit, and sharing the experience of exploration with the public. In pursuing these goals, the objectives under this topic include 1) developing and validating the capability for human explorers to gain deep lunar and planetary sub-surface knowledge and access -- both remotely and through sampling -- ranging down to 1000s of meters, 2) enabling safe and affordable human exploration of other planetary surfaces -- locally but over global distances involving traverses of up to 1000s of kilometers, 3) integrating and validating the technologies needed to revolutionize public engagement in "virtual exploration" -- ranging from higher rate communications, to the creation of virtual reality simulations, to innovative human-machine interfaces, and 4) establishing a foundation for profitable commercial development of space applications of these technologies in the mid- to far-term.

H6.01 Crew Training and On-Board Crew Support
Lead Center: JSC
Participating Center(s): MSFC

Dramatic improvements will be needed in crew and ground operations performance and productivity as NASA develops new operational capabilities to support multiple manned missions, and long duration and long distance missions. Robotic, vehicle and support systems will be required to be more robust, autonomous and intelligent, and more maintainable. These capabilities will allow operators to "buy time" by increasing system mean time between failures, predicting when intervention will be needed, managing degraded operations, and using functional redundancy. Advanced capabilities for information and data analysis and presentation, onboard planning, execution and fault management will be needed to assist the crew. Sophisticated training and maintenance support systems and a robust knowledge base will be needed onboard, and will need to be well integrated with increasingly advanced control and maintenance systems. Ground support operations will need to be redesigned to support the increasing autonomy of space systems and onboard crew. There will need to be advanced support for distributed and adjustable command responsibility, and distributed and flexible training. Significantly more productive and intuitive approaches are needed for updating, adapting, testing and certifying advanced distributed operations software and knowledge bases during missions. Specific areas of interest in the areas of crew training, and in flight and ground operations, include:

Crew Training and Maintenance Support Systems

• Flexible training and tutoring systems for mission operations support, including distributed cooperative training, virtual reality training, intelligent computer-based training, and authoring tools.
• Integration of training with advanced control and maintenance systems.
• Tools to collect/capture and tailor design-time information for use in developing training materials.
• Procedures or technology for evaluating effectiveness of innovative training methods.
• Data Management, Data Analysis, and Presentation and Human Interaction.
• Methods for selecting and summarizing vehicle systems and payload data relating to status and events, to support crew and ground awareness, operational decision-making, and management by exception and opportunity rather than by continuous or scheduled monitoring.
• Human interaction methods for collaboration, cooperation and supervision of intelligent semi-autonomous systems.
• Goal-driven collaborative data analysis systems capable of adaptation and learning.
• Simple systems for notification and coordination, including natural language interfaces.
• Immersive environments: real-time environments to enhance a human operator's ability to interact with large quantities of complex data, especially at distant locations.
• Intelligent data analysis techniques: capabilities to interpret, explain, explore, and classify large quantities of heterogeneous data.

Robust Planning, Operations, Fault Detection, and Recovery with Distributed Adjustable Command Responsibility

• Algorithms for network security that will protect networks at the gigabit and terabit throughput with minimal degradation to throughput.
• Onboard planning, sequencing, monitoring, and re-planning of activities, including systems and crew activities.
• Flexible management of the actions of subsystems within the larger context of system flight rules and constraints.
• Flexible and robust fault management approaches that use system models, "buy time" for human intervention and maintenance, and learn from human operators during and after the interventions.
• Approaches to distributed and adjustable command responsibilities among systems, crew and ground.
• Model-based continuous estimation of the likelihood of critical events, including human errors, to provide warnings of potential events and their consequences, and to suggest appropriate counter-measures.
• Integration of systems for fault management, maintenance and training.

Operations Knowledge Management and Software Updating.

• Systems and processes for crew and ground operators to quickly and effectively define, update, test and certify operational knowledge and rule bases before and during missions, designed for re-use in autonomous systems and in training.
• Tools for incorporating and using engineering data and specifications (about equipment and its operating modes and failures and about operations procedures) into operations knowledge and model-based autonomous systems.
• Tools and environments to support modification and validation of knowledge bases (models of activities, equipment and environment)in intelligent autonomous software by operators, to capture methods and knowledge used by operators during interventions and to collaboratively adapt to unanticipated circumstances.
• Simulation environments and tools for use in designing and testing intelligent semi-autonomous systems.

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H6.02 Distributed/International Ground Operations
Lead Center: JSC
Participating Center(s): MSFC

As the operations for the International Space Station evolves and the International partners become more integrated into the Operations of the ISS, new methods of information sharing and team interactions will be required. The current virtual team tools will not be sufficient to support the distributed international operations team interaction. Operations will also evolve in the ISS to allow the expertise of the Flight Controller to be distributed outside of the facility in order to reduce the need for constant monitoring in the Mission Control Center. Additionally, new methods for distributed functionality of the Mission Control Center in the event of an emergency are needed. Specific areas of interest in the areas of distributed/international operations include:

Distributed Architecture

• The capability to command and control and access an orbiting vehicle telemetry from a single computer.
• The capability to remotely synchronize storage and central servers miles away and to switch operations to the distant servers without any loss of data.

Distributed Operations

• The capability for a distributed immersive virtual environment where 3D models could be manipulated at any location and would result in the model being manipulated at all locations (e.g. rotated) and any annotations or pointing to a segment of the virtual model would be displayed at all locations.
• The capability for a virtual meeting presence, where instead of a video teleconference, you are able to have the other meeting attendees sitting around a table as if they are at that location, but are actually remotely located. (e.g. across the table would be a 3 dimensional image of the other meeting participant reacting and interacting as if they were in the same room).
• Wireless access to voice, video and data in a hand held device.
• International communication tools that would allow real time translation of spoken word from one language to another.

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