Future Needs for Science-Driven Geospatial and Temporal Extravehicular Activity Planning and Execution
Marquez JJ, Miller MJ, Cohen T, Deliz I, Lees DS, Zheng J, Lee YJ, Norheim J, Deans M, Hillenius S. 2019. Future Needs for Science-Driven Geospatial and Temporal Extravehicular Activity Planning and Execution. Astrobiology. 19(3):300-320
Future humanmissions toMars are expected to emphasize scientific exploration. While recentMars rover missions have addressed a wide range of science objectives, human extravehicular activities (EVAs), including the Apollo missions, have had limited experience with science operations. Current EVAs are carefully choreographed and guided continuously from Earth with negligible delay in communications between crew and flight controllers. Future crews onMars will be expected to achieve their science objectives while operating and coordinating with a science team back on Earth under communication latency and bandwidth restrictions. The BASALT (Biologic Analog Science Associated with Lava Terrains) research program conducted Mars analog science on Earth to understand the concept of operations and capabilities needed to support these new kinds of EVAs. A suite of software tools (Minerva) was used for planning and executing all BASALT EVAs, supporting text communication across communication latency, and managing the collection of operational and scientific EVA data. This paper describes the support capabilities provided byMinerva to cope with various geospatial and temporal constraints to support the planning and execution phases of the EVAs performed during the BASALT research program. The results of this work provide insights on software needs for future science-driven planetary EVAs.
- Type
- Journal Article
- Authors
- Marquez, Jessica; Miller, Matthew; Cohen, Tamar; Deliz, Ivonne; Lees, David; Zheng, Jimin; Lee, Yeon; Norheim, Johannes; Deans, Matthew; Hillenius, Steven
- Units
- CRMO , HAVO
- Keywords
- Analog, BASALT, Mars, NASA, Planetary extravehicular activity, Planning and scheduling, Scientific data repository, Spaceflight