Enabling New Operations Concepts for Lunar and Mars Exploration

Abstract

Abstract. The planning and scheduling of human space activities is an expensive and time-consuming task that seldomprovides the crew with the control, flexibility, or insight that they need. During the past thhy years, scheduling software has seen only incremental improvements; however, software limitations continue to prevent even evolutionary improvements in the "operations concept" that is used for human space missions. Space missions are planned on the ground long before they are executed in space, and the crew has little input or influence on the schedule. In recent years the crew has been presented with a "job jar" of activities that they can do whenever they have time, but the contents of the jar is limited to tasks that do not use scarce shared resources and do not have external timing constraints.Consequently, the crew has no control over the schedule of the majority of their own tasks. As humans venture farther from earth for longer durations, it will become lmpaative that they have the ability to plan and schedule not only their own activities, but also the unattended activities of the systems, equipment, and robots on the journey with them. Significant software breakthroughs are required to enable the change in the operations concept. The crew does not have the time to build or modify the schedule by hand. They only need to issue a request to schedule a task and the system should automatically do the rest. Of course, the crew should not be required to build the complete schedule. Controllas on the ground should contribute the models and schedules where they have the better knowledge. The systemmust allow multiple simultaneous users, some on earth and some in space. The Mission Operations Laboratory at NASA's M a r s h a l l Space might Center has been researching and prototyping a modeling schema, scheduling engine, and system architecture that can enable the needed paradigm shift -it can make the crew autonomous. This schema and engine can be the core of a planning and scheduling system that would enable multiple plannen, some on the earth and some in space, to build one integrated timeline. Its modeling schema can capture all the task requkments; its scheduling engine can build the schedule automatically, and its architecture can allow those (on earth and in space) with the best knowledge of the tasks to schedule them This paper describes the enabling technology and proposes an operations concept for astronauts autonomously scheduling their activities and the activities around them

On using an incremental scheduler for human exploration task scheduling

“…The astronauts will be able to make a real-time schedule change and get immediate feedback that the change is feasible. When the astronauts are far from home with significant light-time delays (up to 40 minutes round-trip to Mars), and the return home time measured in months, astronaut Example operations concept -This concept was recently proposed by Jaap and Maxwell [11]. An overview of this concept is depicted in Figure 5.…”