Space & Astronomy/Space and Astronomy (October 1993).iso/mac/TEXT/STATION/SSF93JAN.TXT

Text File | 1993-03-02 | 21KB | 410 lines

JANUARY 1993 STATION BREAK NEWSLETTER  (Vol. 5)


MANAGEMENT CHANGES MADE TO STATION PROGRAM

Culminating six months of reviews, NASA announced plans to consolidate
some management functions for the Space Station Freedom program and create
a contractor-led integration team to ensure the successful building and
deployment of the international space station.

"These moves will improve overall program management and significantly
strengthen the integration of the various station elements," said Arnold
Aldrich, associate administrator for Space Systems Development. "We
foresee no schedule or budgetary impact from these changes. In fact, when
fully implemented, these changes will reduce 'overhead' costs and
strengthen program execution and accountability."

NASA plans to combine the existing Level I (Headquarters) and Level II
(Reston) Space Station Freedom offices in Reston, Va. This step will
consolidate overall program management at Reston. "Reston will remain the
focal point for the space station program for the foreseeable future,"
said Aldrich.

NASA also is working toward establishing a Joint Vehicle Integration Team
(JVIT) at the Johnson Space Center, Houston. The JVIT will be staffed by
the three space station prime contractors (Boeing, McDonnell Douglas and
Rocketdyne). NASA will manage the JVIT contract.

"It is my strong view, which is shared across NASA senior management, that
these changes are essential to the successful implementation of this
program," said Aldrich.

"Further, they are consistent with the findings of a number of internal
NASA reviews and with congressional direction. The changes are fully
supported by the space station hardware contractors and by Grumman."

Grumman is the space station engineering and integration contractor who
will participate with the JVIT and who will continue at Reston as the
program integration contractor.

Aldrich said, "With these changes, the civil service manpower level at
Reston will likely increase above the current level of about 210."

Aldrich said Richard Kohrs will continue as director, Space Station
Freedom, and will be located at Reston. He added that the deputy director
for Program and Operations would be transitioned to the Johnson Space
Center to provide for full and effective management of the Freedom
program, including the JVIT.

According to Aldrich, details of these changes will be spelled out in a
transition plan developed by Kohrs by mid-February 1993. The plan will
clearly define the roles and responsibilities for the space station
offices at Reston; the Lewis Research Center, Cleveland; the Johnson Space
Center, Houston; the Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Ala.; and
the Kennedy Space Center, Fla.

Kohrs' plan also will address longer-range plans to consolidate Space
Shuttle and space station operations by mid-1997 and combine the Space
Shuttle and station programs by late 1999.

"This will result in significant economies of scale in the outyear budget
for space station operations and will greatly improve the overall
operations management of both programs," said Aldrich.

"Over the course of the last few years, the men and women of the NASA team
have made substantial progress in meeting key program milestones," Aldrich
added.

"However, as the program shifts its emphasis from design activities to
hardware development, manufacturing and integration, the buildup to
support these activities at the NASA centers was planned and is required."

Aldrich said these changes have been reviewed with the Office of
Management and Budget and the Congress and will be presented to the
President-elect's transition team, headed by former astronaut Sally Ride.




DISCOVER SPACE STATION FREEDOM UTILIZATION CONFERENCE

Discover Space Station Freedom Utilization Conference June 21-24, 1993 San
Francisco, California

Learn about space-based science and technology development, past, present
and future. Learn about space station research capabilities, the process
of getting an experiment aboard Freedom, and opportunities for small,
rapid-response and commercial payloads. Hear presentations and see
exhibits about plans for space station and Spacelab investigations about
life and materials sciences, technology development and commercial
research.

Hands-on space-based researchers to speak:
Bonnie Dunbar, Ph.D.,
payload commander Drew Gaffney, M.D.,
payload specialist Bernard Harris, M.D,
mission specialist Robert Phillips, D.V.M., Ph.D.,
station chief scientist Robert Bayuzik, Ph.D.,
microgravity researcher Charles Fuller, Ph.D.,
Spacelab investigator Lisa McCauley: associate director, Battelle Advanced
Materials Center

Other speakers invited: the NASA Administrator and Congressman George
Brown.

Information? Call 1-800-933-2089, or fax queries to 202-863-8407.



FEAT MAIL USERS

Users of the Failure Environment Analysis Tool (FEAT) (featured in the
March 1992 Station Break) can now communicate with each other through an
electronic mail service operated by NASA's Computer Software and
Management Information Center (COSMIC). The service provides subscribers
the opportunity to ask questions, obtain answers, and share observations
and suggestions with other subscribers.

Messages are sent to COSMIC's conference service, located at the
University of Georgia, and then forwarded to all subscribers of the
service. This provides an informal, but widely distributed forum for
obtaining help from or offering tips to other FEAT users. The FEAT help
desk will still be available for technical questions; this new service is
intended to help users form alliances and share experiences with each
other.

To become a subscriber, all that is needed is an electronic mail address
that is accessible to Internet either directly or via a gateway
connection, such as BITNET or NASAMail. Simply send a single line message
to:

[e-mail]

saying SUBSCRIBE FEAT-LIST (the subject field is ignored). Your
subscription will be confirmed when you receive a welcome message from the
service.



FREEDOM'S FIRST STRATEGIC PLAN FOR ONBOARD RESEARCH RELEASED

The objective of an organization's strategic plan is to establish a road
map, providing guidance for future action, while still maintaining
flexibility to respond to changes. Any large organization, whether
business or government, should have such a plan.

The Space Station Freedom program has met a milestone in establishing the
first strategic plan for research on Freedom. The strategic planning
process for Freedom sets the overall direction for research and provides a
five year look into the future.

NASA and its international partners of Canada, the European Space Agency
and Japan have successfully developed the strategic planning process for
Freedom utilization. The result is the release of the first preliminary
Consolidated Operations and Utilization Plan (COUP), which identifies
payloads currently planned to fly on Space Station Freedom during the next
five years.

This first COUP identifies payloads from the United States and Canada, the
two countries that provide station infrastructure during the next five
years. COUPs in the following years will also include payloads for the
European Space Agency and Japan as their laboratory modules are placed on
line.

This first COUP is preliminary because payload planning is evolving
rapidly at this time and the assembly sequence of Freedom has changed
recently due to budget reductions. The NASA-sponsored payloads include
potential payloads from the scientific, technological and commercial
research communities.

In line with the objective of providing a long range vision while still
providing flexibility, the COUP reserves some accommodations and resources
for as-yet undefined payloads. This allows the program to prepare for
future payloads while still leaving researchers the flexibility to define
rapidly developed payloads much later in the planning process.

The program anticipates that some payloads may not be defined until one to
two years before flight.

The COUP was approved by the Multilateral Coordination Board, which
contains membership from all four international partners and is chaired by
Richard Kohrs, director of the Space Station Freedom program in
Washington, D.C.


GROUND CONTROL OF SPACE STATION FREEDOM'S ROBOTS

An astronaut floats to a workstation inside the U.S. laboratory module on
Space Station Freedom. Her mission is to inspect an attached payload
anchored on the outside truss. She could suit up for an extravehicular
activity (EVA) and inspect the payload herself, but that would take too
much time. Instead she will 'teleoperate' Freedom's external robotic
system. That is, she will use visual cues given to her by externally
mounted cameras to help her command the robot to travel to the payload and
perform the inspection. Although this gets the job done, it still takes
time away from her important research. How can these kinds of tasks get
done without using too much precious crew time? Let's consider a scenario
that goes beyond Freedom's initial capability.

At the Johnson Space Center in Houston, a ground controller sits down at a
console, getting ready for a full morning's work. He reviews the first
task of the day, the inspection of the attached payload. After preparing a
sequence of commands that will be used to move the robot in and around the
payload, he runs a simulation of the procedures to ensure their
effectiveness. His console displays a three-dimensional stereo graphical
model of the robot superimposed upon real video images from the space
station's external cameras, which have been pointed toward the attached
payload. After he's satisfied that the command sequence will do the job
efficiently and safely, he sends the commands to Freedom's computer for
execution of the task. The inspection is completed; the attached payload
is in good operating condition and will continue to provide outstanding
data.

This method of controlling robotics in space from the ground is called
supervised autonomy. During this time, the crew has been productive as
well.

In this scenario, the Space Station Freedom program is taking advantage of
telerobotic control advances pioneered at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory
(JPL) by a group of engineers called the Supervisory Telerobotics (STELER)
team.

Its goal is to enable operators on the ground to command and control
Freedom's robotic systems to perform maintenance, inspection, and minor
repair duties, freeing the crew to operate experiments.

This activity is sponsored by the Space Station Engineering Prototype
Development activity at Level I, NASA Headquarters. A future edition of
Station Break will feature additional JPL Space Station Freedom robotics
activities that are sponsored by NASA's Office of Advanced Concepts and
Technologies.

Robotics technologies help astronauts "see" where the robot and intended
object are in relation to each other and transmit the "feel" of the force
and torque imparted by the robot through hand controllers and displays.
Even with these advances, controlling robotic devices in space is still
challenging. It takes precise coordination between the human controllers
and the moving machine doing the work in space. The slightest error in
position or speed of motion can be potentially hazardous. Now imagine
trying to control robots in space from a ground station. The time delay
between sending a command and when the robot executes the command and
reports back to the ground can be several seconds. This complication may
be difficult, but the JPL engineers are overcoming it with an advanced
local-remote site architecture design. In this concept, the remote site
robot on Space Station Freedom will be commanded from the local site
system at Johnson through normal space station communications links.

The local site workstation is configured to help the operator easily
create and verify a command sequence for the task at hand. A network
communication module provides the software communication link with the
remote site. The hub of the local site revolves around the User Macro
Interface (UMI) for manipulation and Operator Coached Machine Vision
(OCMV) for perception. A Master Knowledge Base module contains all of the
object (in our earlier case, an attached payload) data including size and
location, graphical data, robot design data, dynamic control parameters
and video data. The UMI is a menu-driven system that helps the operator
design, build, store, and replay a sequence of manipulative commands to be
sent to the remote site robot for execution. The OCMV captures video
images at the remote site and allows the operator to overlay graphical
objects onto the video images to determine relative positions and
orientations.

The object location is determined by using camera design data and the
geometric position of the cameras relative to the worksite. Another
module, the Remote Site Simulator and Collision Predictor, uses the robot
design data, planned trajectory data, and worksite geometry to check for
potential collisions between the robot and other objects.

The remote site system, called the Modular Telerobot Task Execution System
or MOTES, keeps an orderly back and forth movement of commands between the
remote site robot and the local site through the use of software modules.
The complete system is contained within one box with multiple computer
boards and uses real-time Ada as the software language. This makes
transferring the technology easier since Freedom's computers use Ada. This
modular software approach readily accommodates future upgrades with a
minimum of time and expense.

These telerobotic concepts have been demonstrated and verified on the
ground through an established test program that uses facilities and
hardware at other NASA field centers as well as at JPL. An early test
involved a robotic inspection of a PAM booster rocket at Kennedy Space
Center, the remote site. The 3,000 mile distance between the local and
remote sites resulted in a 2-3 second time delay between sending a command
from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and receiving it at Kennedy. The robot
worked its way around the booster, inspecting it without touching it. The
robot maintained its position within 0.5 to 1 centimeters from design
specifications. A mistake, such as unintentional or forceful contact by
the robot, would have caused considerable damage to the booster and robot.

No mistakes were made and subsequent testing had robots successfully
manipulate objects with as much as an eight second time delay. This
technology is currently being transferred to Johnson's space station
robotic testbed (this facility will be described in a future Station Break
article) for further testing and evaluation. This month the Johnson team
will perform a servicing task by controlling a JPL STELER lab robot from a
distance of 1,500 miles.

The promise of autonomous control of Freedom's robots is substantial.
Astronauts can spend less time performing extravehicular activities, have
more options available for handling difficult robotic servicing tasks, and
above all, have more time to pursue space-based research and    development.

During the next two years, the JPL telerobotic local-remote site
architecture will demonstrate more surface inspection and remote
manipulation tasks. Extensive testing will continue to take place at
Johnson's robotics testbed. These efforts by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory
and Johnson engineers will increase the efficiency and effectiveness of
Freedom's crew and help enable the incorporation of advanced robotic
technologies into the Space Station Freedom program.



NASA SIGNS AGREEMENT TO FURTHER STUDY RUSSIAN SOYUZ-TM CAPSULES AS ACRV

NASA will decide at next year's end if it wants to forge ahead with buying
a modified Russian-built Soyuz-TM capsule to use as the interim lifeboat
aboard Space Station Freedom.

NASA Associate Administrator Arnold Aldrich and Russia's NPO Energia
General Director Yuri Semenov signed a Summary of Discussion agreement
last month. The agreement calls for a year- long "Phase B" study on using
the Russian Soyuz-TM capsule as an interim lifeboat, known as the assured
crew return vehicle (ACRV). The ACRV will provide quick egress from
Freedom and safe return to Earth in emergency situations.

"We have had very excellent technical exchanges and been able to conclude
during this meeting that, in fact, it is certainly technically feasible to
use the Soyuz as an ACRV for the early phase of Space Station Freedom,"
Aldrich said. "This is a period when up to four crew persons could be on
Space Station Freedom."

The agreement was signed after a final two weeks of working meetings at
Johnson Space Center and a series of fact-finding meetings over nine
months in Russia and the United States. "Based on the results of this
work, and the discussions conducted at this meeting in the Design, Systems
Engineering and Integration, Operations and Management technical panels,
both sides have determined that it is technically feasible to use a
modified Soyuz-TM as an interim ACRV for Space Station Freedom," according
to the Summary of Discussion agreement.

Aldrich said the group "also worked on a detailed task agreement for
proceeding with a detailed design study where we'll look at the design
modifications that would be required for Soyuz and for the Space Station
Freedom vehicle. We also will look at the operations planning and
implementation and how to provide support for such missions."

"These [additional] studies we hope will give us the information we need
to make a decision on whether to go ahead with full procurement of a Soyuz
for Space Station Freedom at the end of 1993," Aldrich added.

Semenov, who was part of the Apollo-Soyuz team nearly 18 years ago, said
of the talks, "It has been very nice working together. For some of us it
has been a reunion. Many people who participated in the effort were part
of the Apollo-Soyuz project."

"Our people, technical specialists, have indeed presented all the
technical information asked of them and have made a very good, convincing
case for the feasibility for using the Soyuz as an ACRV for Space Station
Freedom," Semenov said.

Over the next year, Semenov said, engineers will look at the modifications
necessary for both the Soyuz and Freedom. "We understand technically what
and how it needs to be done. It is not a matter of principle; it is simply
a matter of doing it."

Since the Russian vehicle has extremely tight quarters and will hold only
three crew people, at least two of the vehicles would be modified and
connected to Freedom to provide quick, safe escape in the event of an
emergency, Aldrich said.

Some of the technical issues:

* Extending the Soyuz's six-month life span up to three years;

* Extending the chemical life of the batteries;

* Interfacing the Soyuz and all of its systems with Space Station

* Freedom and maintaining compatibility; and

* Maintaining the proper temperature for the propellant used in the
descent vehicle for guidance and control.

"There is nothing here that cannot be solved," Semenov said. "Our
engineers have to work together. All of these issues have been thoroughly
examined. All the engineers need is time."

The agreement signed states, "Upon completion of "Phase B" activities, and
based on the results of those activities, a decision will be made on
whether or not to proceed into the full-scale development of the Soyuz-TM
as an ACRV."

Aldrich and Semenov also said an agreement was signed to fly a Russian
cosmonaut on a Space Shuttle mission and for a NASA mission specialist to
work aboard Russia's space station Mir in 1995. Near the end of the NASA
mission specialist's stint aboard Mir, the Shuttle, outfitted with
Spacelab, will dock with Mir for a joint science mission. Then the NASA
astronaut will return home on the Space Shuttle.

"This is a broad program of cooperation that is envisaged with hope,"
Semenov said.


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