Mission & Project Info | NOAA’s Aquarius Undersea Laboratory
Mission Blog

As the second week of the NEEMO 9 mission comes to an end, the pace is starting to settle down a bit. The science objectives are largely accomplished, and the crew was able to enjoy a well-earned day off on Sunday with scheduled private conferences with their families. Several major “exploration” initiatives were begun toward the end of the week, and will be continuing for the remaining four days of the mission.

A centerpiece of previous NEEMO missions is called “Waterlab”. At first glance this may appear to be just a rickety lattice of PVC pipes, strung haphazardly together on the sea floor. But to those of us who have previously constructed Waterlab, it’s so much more! Waterlab promotes crew skills of planning out a complex task, handing over from team to team involved in the multiple construction activities required to finish it, following a procedure, and working in a cumbersome environment. It also has relevance as a Lunar analog task.

During the Apollo program there was no requirement for EVA (spacewalking) crewmembers to communicate with their landing vehicle/habitat. Crewmembers during Apollo communicated directly to Earth. Due to the planned increase in lunar surface crew size, in the future it may be beneficial for crewmembers to have the capability to communicate to crewmembers remaining in their habitat while conducting surface exploration. But the lunar horizon for an EVA crewmember is ~2.4 km, so in order to communicate to the habitat while on excursions beyond that distance, a communications relay station will need to be constructed - kind of like a mini cell phone tower. A 20′ (6.15m) tall relay tower would increase the communication range to ~9 km. So constructing Waterlab is similar to relay tower constructions we may someday see on the Moon. It is being done with a c.g. config determined from the earlier c.g. experiment.

One important question facing NASA as we prepare to return to the Moon is how to make our EVA time more efficient. During this mission we are collecting data concerning the crew members’ work efficiency, measured by comparing the overhead time it takes to prepare for an EVA compared to the productive EVA time. This measurement is called the Work Efficiency Index (WEI). Exploration EVAs (on the Moon or Mars) will be conducted at a much higher frequency than we are currently performing EVA out of the Space Shuttle or International Space Station. Therefore, the WEI of exploration EVAs will need to improve by a factor of 10 over current methods! The data collected from this and future NEEMO missions will provide insight regarding how the WEI can be improved both in terms of equipment design and crew procedures.

Another important question we face prior to returning to the Moon is how to maximize the human and robotic resources we have. We have successfully demonstrated that human operators on Earth can control robots on a distant world with numerous Mars missions. We routinely use robotics on the Space Shuttle and Space Station that are controlled by in situ astronauts. And we have the experience of hundreds of suited spacewalks. What we don’t have much experience with is optimizing between the 3 options. Crew time is precious, so it’s advantageous to move operations to ground controllers wherever possible. The ground has the time delay to deal with, but they have advantages like being able to work all night long while the crew is sleeping. In short, there is always a tradeoff between the more precious crew time and the (expected) higher efficiency of crew work. How to optimize the split of work between EVA work, crew controlled robotics, and ground controlled robotics is an important question that needs to be answered prior to returning to the Moon.

The ROV on this NEEMO mission performs the role of the robot. It can be a surface rover, or a free flyer (resembling the end of a robotic arm.) It can be controlled by the control center in Houston, or the in situ crew. As the mission continues, we have been experimenting with all options and documenting lessons learned to help answer the larger question of how best to split work. NEEMO 9 is just the tip of the iceberg in answering this question, but over the course of multiple missions we expect to have a significant database to help drive our Lunar ops concepts. The pictures below show the ROV, in this case driven by the ExPOC in Houston, bringing some Waterlab parts to an aquanaut to aid in his work.

We have several activities planned during this mission to formally measure the efficiency of EVA crewmembers compared to ground based robotics, so that working together we can optimize the science productivity of an EVA astronaut. For this study we are measuring the task efficiency index (TEI) of humans working alone compared to robots working alone compared to a human/robotic synergy solution. This TEI study is the start of a series of studies that will be conducted in various analog environments to optimize the interactions between humans and robots, using various objective measures of scientific return vs. crew time.

If you missed the Good Morning America feature on ABC yesterday, you can check it out here.

We apologize for all the false alarms on the airing of this event. Hopefully it didn’t inconvenience anyone too much. The lesson learned is that the network airs its features when it decides to, not necessarily when they tell you they will…

Thanks for staying with us!

- NEEMO 9 Topside Team