NASA Mission Control Research Articles

Understanding and characterizing speaker roles within naturalistic task-based communications: The fearless steps APOLLO-11 corpus

Naturalistic team based speech communications requires specific protocols/procedures to be followed to allow for effective task completion for distributed team members. NASA Apollo-11 was the first manned space mission to successfully bring astronauts to the moon and return them safely. Mission specialists roles within NASA Mission Control (MOCR) are complex and reflected in their communications. In this study, we perform speaker clustering to identify speech segments uttered by the same speaker from recently recovered Fearless Steps APOLLO corpus (CRSS-UTDallas). We propose a pretrained network to obtain speaker embeddings and use a framework that builds on these learned embeddings which achieves a clustering accuracy of 73.4%. We also track/tag key speakers-of-interest across three critical mission phases and analyze speaker roles based on speech duration. NASA communication protocols dictate that information be communicated in a concise manner. In automated communication analysis, individuals higher in trait dominance generally speak more and gain more control over group processes. Hence, speaker duration of primary- versus -secondary speaker and speaker turns are metrics used to determine speaker role. This analysis provides greater understanding of communications protocol and serves as a lasting tribute to the «Heroes Behind the Heroes of Apollo» as well as preserve “words spoken in space.”

Fearless steps, NASA’s first heroes: Conversational speech analysis of the Apollo-11 mission control personnel

Between 1963 and 1972, a massive team of dedicated scientists, engineers, and specialists at the NASA Mission Control Center (MCC) worked seamlessly together in a cohesive manner to successfully carry out multiple manned missions to the moon. All communications between personnel were carried out over multiple inter-connected audio channels and recorded on two 30-track analog tapes. Digitization of the entire Apollo-11 mission tapes made possible through the UTDallas-CRSS Fearless Steps (FS) initiative contains the recordings of all the crew members including the three astronauts. With over 600 speakers in constant communication ensuring the astronauts’ safety throughout the mission, the success of the Apollo missions can be attributed largely to the MCC crew members. The focus of this effort is thus, to analyze their high-level group dynamics and intricate communication characteristics and gain insight into the success parameters involved in such large-scale time-critical operations. The 100 hour FS Challenge corpus highlights multiple salient moments like Lift-Off and Lunar-Landing and poses its’ own challenges for core speech tasks. This effort aims at analyzing spontaneous multi-speaker conversations in recordings often degraded by various noise types. Analysis of speech characteristics under varying stress, overlap, and noise conditions are observed to develop novel speech-activity and speaker models. These domain-specific models are leveraged to develop state-of-the-art SLT systems.

Speaker tracking using SincNet for multi-channel naturalistic audio corpora: Apollo 11 fearless steps

Apollo-11 was the first manned space mission to successfully bring astronauts to the moon and return them safely. As a massive collaborative effort, with astronauts flying the missions in outer space, the entire communications between flight controllers, their backroom support teams and, astronauts have taken place inside NASA Mission Control Center. The communications stemming from the experienced team of scientists, engineers, and technicians who worked collectively behind the scenes in the MOCR have not been identified. In this study, we propose to identify the speakers in the Mission Control Room for a small subset of 100 h derived from a collective 19 000 h of Apollo-11 audio data, which correspond to three challenging phases of the mission: lift-off, lunar landing, and lunar walking. The speaker identification solution explores a convolutional neural network architecture called SincNet across all three Apollo-11 phases. The speaker models obtained from the subset of 100 hours will be used to track speakers on the complete corpora. Our goal is to make it possible to be able to access each individual speaker involved with the Apollo 11 mission.Apollo-11 was the first manned space mission to successfully bring astronauts to the moon and return them safely. As a massive collaborative effort, with astronauts flying the missions in outer space, the entire communications between flight controllers, their backroom support teams and, astronauts have taken place inside NASA Mission Control Center. The communications stemming from the experienced team of scientists, engineers, and technicians who worked collectively behind the scenes in the MOCR have not been identified. In this study, we propose to identify the speakers in the Mission Control Room for a small subset of 100 h derived from a collective 19 000 h of Apollo-11 audio data, which correspond to three challenging phases of the mission: lift-off, lunar landing, and lunar walking. The speaker identification solution explores a convolutional neural network architecture called SincNet across all three Apollo-11 phases. The speaker models obtained from the subset of 100 hours will be used to track s...

Communication in the Spaceflight Multi-Team System: Training and Technology Recommendations to Support Boundary Spanners

Long-duration exploration missions (LDEMs) in space rely on the coordinated efforts of a large, dynamic, and global multi-team system (MTS) that crosses organizational, geographic, cultural, and temporal boundaries. A key role in the spaceflight MTS is the leader who connects or spans the boundaries between distinct teams and supports the development of team cognition. The purpose of the present paper is to provide recommendations on how to train “boundary spanner” leaders and the tools they use to coordinate and communicate with teams in the context of a LDEM MTS. To this end, we address four specific questions focused on 1) how the MTS will change for future missions, 2) identifying the primary boundary spanners, 3) identifying the key attitudes, behaviors, and cognitions (ABCs) for effective boundary spanners, and 4) communication technologies to support the development of team cognition in the MTS. Results indicate six critical boundary spanner roles in the NASA Mission Control Center and 12 ABCs that should be trained. We conclude with concrete recommendations for NASA and its partners to empirically test different training approaches and commercial task management tools the MTS can use to improve communication efficiency and accuracy.

Needs Analysis and Technology Evaluation

A NASA Mission Control group provided us the opportunity to conduct a needs analysis, produce software guided by the needs analysis, and evaluate the software prototype. This paper reports our discriminative evaluation of new prototype software for Attitude Determination and Control Officers, who plan and execute maneuvers of the International Space Station with their Russian counterparts. On a specific, pragmatic level, our evaluation provided evidence of large performance improvement. Relative to legacy software, the new software reduced time and errors by half in a laboratory experiment using valid tasks identified from the needs analysis. Our discriminative evaluation also isolated specific benefits attributable to specific improvements in alignment of technology to the work. Our discriminative evaluation isolated contributing factors affecting performance by using item sets designed to differentially engage software components. This approach for identifying specific factors contributing to performance improvement may be reusable in many situations, particularly where it is not feasible to develop and test many software versions, each differing in just a single factor of interest.

Complex collaborative problem-solving processes in mission control.

NASA's Mission Control Center (MCC) is responsible for control of the International Space Station (ISS), which includes responding to problems that obstruct the functioning of the ISS and that may pose a threat to the health and well-being of the flight crew. These problems are often complex, requiring individuals, teams, and multiteam systems, to work collaboratively. Research is warranted to examine individual and collaborative problem-solving processes in this context. Specifically, focus is placed on how Mission Control personnel-each with their own skills and responsibilities-exchange information to gain a shared understanding of the problem. The Macrocognition in Teams Model describes the processes that individuals and teams undertake in order to solve problems and may be applicable to Mission Control teams. Semistructured interviews centering on a recent complex problem were conducted with seven MCC professionals. In order to assess collaborative problem-solving processes in MCC with those predicted by the Macrocognition in Teams Model, a coding scheme was developed to analyze the interview transcriptions. Findings are supported with excerpts from participant transcriptions and suggest that team knowledge-building processes accounted for approximately 50% of all coded data and are essential for successful collaborative problem solving in mission control. Support for the internalized and externalized team knowledge was also found (19% and 20%, respectively). The Macrocognition in Teams Model was shown to be a useful depiction of collaborative problem solving in mission control and further research with this as a guiding framework is warranted.

Controlled by history [NASA's Mission Control Center

The design, architecture and technology of Nasa's legendary Mission Control Centers reflects the 20th century's tempestuous history and represents an important part of America's cultural identity from that period.

Echoes from the Moon

We report on a determination of the Earth-Moon distance, performed by students of an Italian high school, based on measurements of the time delay of the “echo” in the radio communications between NASA mission control in Houston and the Apollo astronauts on the lunar surface. By using open-source audio-editing software, the distance can be determined with a∼0.1% accuracy, allowing us to observe the effect of the eccentricity of the orbit of the Moon.

Command and Telemetry Latency Effects on Operator Performance during International Space Station Robotic Operations

International Space Station operations require onboard crewmembers to perform numerous robotic assembly, maintenance, and inspection activities. Ground-based control of the Mobile Servicing System (MSS), in particular the Special Purpose Dexterous Manipulator (SPDM), has been identified as one potential solution to alleviate disproportionate robotic maintenance and inspection timelines that potentially exceed crew availability and duty times. Challenges to operator performance and safety of ground-based control of these manipulators include significant data and telemetry latency. Recent trends of transmissions between the International Space Station and NASA's Mission Control Center have determined the round-trip time delay can range from 6-8 seconds. The purpose of this study was to examine operator performance when subjects performed representative dexterous robotic tasks with anticipated command and telemetry time delays. Results from this study may determine whether augmentations to existing operator tools and procedures are required in order to manually control the SPDM from ground-based workstations.

Human Information Flow and Communication Pattern in NASA Mission Control System

This study is a preliminary effort to explore human information flow and communication pattern in an operation-critical and time-constrained collaboration environment such as NASA Mission Control System. Understanding information flow and communication pattern is a key step for improving the reliability and accuracy of a complex Human-Machine system. It also can be applied to design a better communication system for future NASA Mission Control Center operations. The information flow and communication pattern analysis based on NASA mission control training simulations indicates that there is no significant utilization difference among communication channels, however, the communication channel's burst rate is significantly affected by phase, mission and channel type.

Mission Control Knowledge Synchronization: Operations to Reference Performance Cycles

Capturing and utilizing previously generated knowledge is crucial to an organization's development and responsiveness in a dynamic environment. Even so, the creation of a reference source from operational knowledge is affected by situational contexts, events, and organizational constraints. The organizational operations to reference cycle within NASA's Mission Control Center can be examined by the approval process of Flight Rule Change Requests (FRCRs). The FRCR process is intended to document knowledge capture and synchronization tasks associated with space flight missions. External pacing exists due to the operational demands of the launch schedule; procedures are not written or modified without direct relation to operational experience or mission requirements. Preliminary analysis illustrates that, although the FRCR approval process has a cyclic nature with a natural frequency of about one month, launches act as critical forcing functions since procedural knowledge and controller expertise must be synchronized before each mission.

The KidSat Student Mission Operations Center-SMOC

KidSat was a NASA pilot project wherein middle school students investigated their world with images of the Earth using a digital camera onboard the space shuttle. Students requested and retrieved Earth images in Student Mission Operations Centers (SMOCs) located in their schools using the Internet as their communications link while the shuttle was in orbit. In the SMOCs, students selected specific geographic sites around the world, determined the map coordinates for each site, and relayed the site data to a KidSat computer on the shuttle via a KidSat Mission Control Gateway (MCG). The computer then activated the KidSat digital camera mounted in the window of the shuttle, and the images were downloaded to the KidSat data system and posted on a web page for the middle schools students. The SMOC was a miniature mission control center modeled after NASA's Mission Control Center in Houston, TX, but with a very specific purpose: to image the Earth with the KidSat camera. The SMOCs had one primary task: target and verify images of the Earth to meet the objectives of their school's investigation themes. Students were organized into teams that planned investigations and associated locations to image, monitored orbit paths and flight timelines, checked weather conditions at the targeted sites, and provided public information to the local media. The SMOCs made the KidSat program unique and exciting as students actually used NASA technology in combination with school equipment to actively participate in a shuttle mission. Prior to launch, students gathered information, asked questions, hypothesized outcomes, and planned ways to test their hypotheses using the Earth images. From their studies, they were able to draw conclusions, for example, about the relationship between man and the environment. In a school setting, the application of knowledge is too often restricted to controlled science lab experiments in which the outcome is already known. KidSat opened a world of possibilities, allowing students to investigate issues using images to determine actual conditions. KidSat successfully adapted NASA technology for use in the middle school curriculum, expanding the horizons of those who were involved.

The distributed earth model orbiter simulation (DEMOS) three dimensional system at Johnson Space Center

Flight controllers at the NASA Mission Control Center in Houston have a new visualization tool to help them support the nation's space program. The Distributed Earth Model Orbiter Simulation (DEMOS) system provides three dimensional realistic images of the shuttle as it orbits the Earth. The system displays the correct position and attitude of the spacecraft over the Earth's surface. DEMOS also models the locations of the sun, the moon, the planets and the stars. Telemetry supplies the joint angles for the robot ann. Mission Flight controllers can monitor deployment of payloads when there is no live video. DEMOS provides a flexible mission analysis and real time support tool. It unifies the disciplines of celestial mechanics, three dimensional graphics and user interfaces. This paper describes the coordinate systems, the state vector propagation methods and the Attitude Maneuver Predictor (AMP) capabilities. The Attitude Maneuver Predictor simulates eigen-axis maneuvers. Flight controllers use this mode often for analysis of thermal constraints on payloads and on the orbiter.

Fiber Optics and Fibonacci

A recent problem in fiber optic networks led to a surprising answer. NASA Mission Control Center wanted a design for a fiber optic network that had extremely high reliability. A fiber optic network consists of a number of stations connected by fiber optic links. Stations send and receive messages, and also pass on messages intended for other stations. One common configuration for fiber optic networks is called a token ring. In a single ring configuration, the stations are arranged in a circle, with each station connected to the next by a single, one way fiber optic link (FIGURE 1). A more robust dual ring network has two links between each pair of adjacent stations, so that communications can flow in either direction (FIGURE 2). In this configuration, each station is connected to exactly two neighboring stations, and can transmit or pass on information to either of them. The advantage of a dual ring network is that a single failed station does not break the ring. Any number of consecutive stations in the ring can fail, and every working station can still communicate with every other working station.

NASA Flight Controllers Become AI Pioneers

NASA Flight Controllers Become AI Pioneers