How engineers are operating space missions from their homes

Last Tuesday, a team of engineers gathered around a computer screen to monitor a spacecraft flying around a rocky asteroid more than 140 million miles from Earth. As they progressed through the rehearsal of an important interplanetary dress, they moved the spacecraft through a number of tasks to perform when trying to pull small rock samples from the asteroid surface in August. This dress rehearsal has been working for years and the team was looking forward to meeting together at the Mission Center in Colorado.

Instead, most of them kept tabs on events at home. “It was the skeleton crew who supported the event directly compared to what we originally planned,” said Mike Moreau, project manager for missions at NASA's Godard Space Flight Center. The budge. "More than three-quarters of the team were working from home and monitoring remotely."

As part of NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission, Moreau is tasked with capturing a sample of the asteroid Bennu and bringing it to Earth for research. The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft was released in 2016 and the team has been planning this particular dress rehearsal for over 10 years. They did not depend on the plague that occurred at one of the most anticipated checkpoints on their mission, but the show had to go on.

“We will all be together in the mission operation area and actually rehearsed before this checkpoint rehearsal. NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission director Dante Lauretta says: The budge. “Nothing happened. We were all in a remote working environment. ”

Like millions of workers around the world, engineers operating spaceships are contemplating what to do while working from home. All of NASA's centers have established mandatory telecommunication policies with the exception of mandatory personnel. This includes many people who calculate the commands of the interplanetary space probe and navigate the rover through the rough terrain of other worlds.

Spacecraft manipulation often relies on large amounts of face-to-face communication, so some were initially awkward to switch. The same is true of Carrie Bridge, who works as a liaison between scientists and engineers running NASA's curiosity rover on Mars. She talks to scientists across the country every day about the kind of science Rover wants to achieve, and then conveys that desire to engineers who actually fly robots. Usually, she visited the engineering team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California to coordinate the rover's movements throughout the day.

“My morning I sat on the computer next to the rover planner after talking on the phone. The budge. “We see the terrain and the goal. Then I report to the scientists and say, 'Okay.

Now the entire routine has been moved online. She said about 15 to 20 chat rooms are open for all engineers and rover planners. “The intensity has increased because of what I'm always looking at,” said Bridge. “I'm not exercising anymore,” she jokes. "I've been walking before, but now I'm staring at the computer station for hours without moving."

One of the main rover planners that communicate with Bridge is Matt Gildner. Matt Gildner is coordinating all orders for curiosity in a one bedroom apartment in Los Angeles. He and his team began testing how to work remotely “when the writing was on the wall,” about the COVID-19 epidemic in mid-March, he said. He started adjusting everything he needed at home, including audio headsets, monitors, cables and 3D glasses. Curiosity can re-send 3D images of Martian terrain that rover planners and engineers observe with 3D meshes to simulate how the rover interacts with the environment as it moves.

"Now I am at home. All headsets were worn when talking to multiple audio channels, wearing red blue glasses and evaluating a portion of the planned drive for a few minutes as part of the plan. Says Gildner. The budge. “I have a nice desk and all the houseplants and dual monitors, keyboard and mouse headset stands around. And this is working fine. ”

Someone not In order to send orders developed by Gildner and his team to Curiosity, you have to physically take on the JPL. The person sends a command to a deep space network, a large array of wireless antennas on Earth, and then to an interplanetary space probe like a rover.

Other spacecraft operators actually figured out how to send orders to the spacecraft even if no one was in the mission control center. Utah's Institute of Space Mechanics operates two small NASA satellites (HARP and CIRiS) that observe the Earth. The team there usually enters the mission control center and sends orders to the spacecraft through Virginia's ground stations. But amidst the strange change of fate, the operator of the lab came up with a way to actually send commands from a laptop at home just before everyone was locked out.

SDL engineer and spacecraft operator Ryan Martineau said, “We were preparing and testing work in home technology just before the pandemic. The budge. I had to run the ship frequently in the middle of the night, so I was preparing to test a safe solution without having the same two people go to work every day. ”

Martineau and his colleagues basically linked the software used by the mission control center to the Virginia ground station and put it on a local computer. "We are [virtual] "It's a Linux system inside a Windows laptop that contains all the software you need to run a spacecraft." Thanks to this arrangement, Martineau can control the spacecraft around the Earth from his home for the near future. That means juggling other responsibilities while maintaining the satellite.

Martineau said, “I am three years old and three months old. "There were a few cases where we had to quickly change diapers before sending orders to the spaceship."

The presence of children and pets has been mainstream for many people working at NASA's home. “One of our dogs [a Great Dane] Amber Straughn, vice president of astrophysics at Goddard, writes an email with: The budge. "He definitely did it twice when I was on the phone."

The OSIRIS-REx team was also preparing for a big dress rehearsal last week, and new coworkers attended. Many team managers had to juggle family responsibilities such as distance learning when preparing for the event. “For some managers, this was very stressful because they wanted to see progress. "But we were also very concerned about how people were sustaining."

Ultimately, everyone made it on the day of the rehearsal. However, as most of the team moved away from Lockheed Martin's Mission Control Center in Colorado, a little tweaking was needed. “There is no substitute for the same building. On the same floor; I walked into someone's office and said, “ Hey, I was just thinking about this. How about on your side? ”Says Lauretta. "We couldn't actually do anything."

Lauretta says this team was done over the phone. mostly There were technical difficulties, but it worked. “For whatever reason, my phone is still muted,” he says. "When you call, you talk and no one will listen to me." He was disappointed, but said that everyone has a good spirit. "In fact, everyone was happy to talk to each other in group chats."

Despite the added challenges, rehearsals began without a hitch. In the lab session, OSIRIS-REx is closer to Bennu than ever before. The key manipulation was the OSIRIS-REx arriving right next to Bennu's surface in August and pioneering a way to pump 60 grams of rock in a crater called Nightingale. Despite the sadness of the unexpected, the engineers were thrilled with the results.

“I would say it tasted bitter in the sense that it was a good day. Everything went according to plan. But we couldn't celebrate it as a team, ”says Lauretta. "I hope all of you can meet in August to celebrate the actual sample collection event."

Now it is not known exactly when the extreme social distance ends, so everyone, not just the spacecraft operator, can return to their daily routine. But until that time, those in charge of spacecraft operations are making the most of the new mission control center at home. For Gildner, I was distracted from the daily news cycle surrounding the virus.

Gildner explains: “When working on a space flight project, it's inevitable to escape from all the work in progress.” I think."