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Hi everyone. I'm Heather Paul, an engineer working with
NASA's Desert Research and Technology Studies, or Desert RATS.
I had the opportunity to talk with a few of the people on our team, to find out
what they had to do to prepare for our field activities.
Let's see what they had to say.
My name is Barbara Jainoko and I'm the test coordinator for Desert RATS,
and it's really a year-long process to get ready for a field exercise.
We spend most of the year planning the activity, we conduct dry runs at Johnson Space Center
over the summer, and conduct the field test over a four-week period.
Hi, I'm Jessica Markus and I work with the development team that does SCORE,
which is the scheduling and planning tool used in Desert RATS.
For many weeks, Lisa and Megan have been planning all the activities that the crew needs
to do so they get all their science and operations done here at Desert RATS.
My name is Zane, I represent the crew office.
The astronaut office has prepared for this test by going back to school.
We do a lot of classroom work, we've done some field work,
and we're doing a couple of dry runs today and now we're ready to go.
Hi, my name is Jacob Bleacher and I'm a geologist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.
We're getting ready for this test this year, we basically just continue to do our field research
and run through the dry runs and try to give the engineers as much feedback as we can
about all the systems that we're going to be testing.
My name is Mary Sue Bell, I'm a planetary geologist at the Johnson Space Center
and I'm a backup crewman for the Desert RATS 2011 mission.
So I've been training right along with the prime crew,
to make sure that we follow the procedures precisely and get all of the data
that we need to send back to the science backroom in Houston, Texas.
Hi, I'm Chris Kennedy. I'm the Habitat Demonstration Unit project manager.
This year at Desert RATS we've brought the Deep Space Habitat configuration.
What we've done to get ready is, we've added a telerobotics workstation and the X-Hab Loft,
which the University of Wisconsin won that competition.
We also added the Hygiene Module functionality so the crew can spend overnight stays.
Hi I'm Cindy Evans. I'm a geoscientist at the NASA Johnson Space Center
and I'm the manager of the GeoLab and the DSH.
Before coming out to the field we had a lot of hardware to integrate in the DSH;
we had software to integrate; we had teams to coordinate with;
we're part of the science team back in Houston.
And of course, we had to get ourselves ready for just being out in the desert for three weeks.
Hi, my name is Mike Miller. I am the EVA backpack lead
and also a member of the communications team from KSC.
To prepare for the field test for the backpacks we had to ship all the packs back to KSC,
where we upgraded the voice system and we did a complete checkout
to make sure everything was ready for the test.
And then we shipped them to Houston for the dry runs,
supported three week-long dry runs, and then after the final checkout
shipped them to Arizona for the field test.
For the communications team, we have a lot more infrastructure to prepare.
We have trailers and Hummers and trucks and lots of networking gear and wireless gear,
and all that has to be designed ahead of time and prepared and tested,
and shipped up here where we have to hike up Mount Elgin.
We hike a couple other mountains and we go to local universities
to put up antennas and we bring all that back to base camp
and we set up all of our structure and towers out here.
Hi, I'm Kim Hambuchen. I am a robotics engineer at Johnson Space Center.
We've been getting ready for the field test by making sure that our robots
can actually handle the desert. We've gotten Robonaut 2 all geared up
to handle dust and the wind. And we've also been working on Centaur,
the Centaur base, getting some sensors so that we can do remote operations of Centaur,
because that's a new thing for this field test this year.
My name is Regan Geeseman. I'm the photographer and I also do video for all of the Desert RATS.
I have to spend a lot of time making sure I have cameras, batteries,
lenses, filters and all kinds of technical things.
I also make sure to pack an extra pair of underwear.