Abstract
Future human missions to Mars are expected to emphasize scientific exploration. While recent Mars 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 on Mars 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 by Minerva 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.
Highlights
Mars extravehicular activities (EVAs), or planetary spacewalks, will face a host of new challenges when conducting simultaneous human and robotic operations on the surface while managing communication limitations with experts on Earth
This paper describes the support capabilities provided by Minerva to cope with various geospatial and temporal constraints to support the planning and execution phases of the EVAs performed during the BASALT research program
Minerva is composed of three software tools that support one or more of the key work functions required for planning and executing science-driven planetary EVAs (Table 2): xGDS, Playbook, and Surface Exploration Traverse Analysis and Navigation Tool (SEXTANT) (Deans et al, 2017). xGDS and Playbook have been deployed in a variety of analog field tests such as Desert Research and Technology Studies (Desert RATS), NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations (NEEMO), and Pavilion Lake Research
Summary
Mars extravehicular activities (EVAs), or planetary spacewalks, will face a host of new challenges when conducting simultaneous human and robotic operations on the surface while managing communication limitations with experts on Earth. Future EVA operations will integrate a vast amount of systems and operational knowledge to promote productivity and ensure mission success This knowledge will be shared between the crew on Mars and the Earth-based engineering, operations, and scientific specialists who can only communicate with each other in a timedelayed communication environment (due to the distance between the planets). Future planetary EVAs will have to distill broad scientific research objectives into operationally useful constructs necessary to support successful science-driven EVA operations. To this end, the BASALT (Biologic Analog Science Associated with Lava Terrains) research program aimed to study and understand the processes and the underlying software capabilities necessary for planning and executing science-driven EVAs on Mars. Minerva is composed of three software tools: Exploration Ground Data Systems (xGDS), Playbook, and Surface Exploration Traverse Analysis and Navigation Tool (SEXTANT), subsequently described
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