>> Hi everybody.
It's Josh Farley here inside NASA's Mission Control Center
here at the Johnson Space Center.
I'm joined by my friend Melanie Miller
who I think has probably one
of the coolest jobs here inside the room.
She's a robotics officer so she's in charge and her team is
in charge of actually operating the robot arm, the Dexterous,
as we call it, the special purpose Dexterous manipulator
and all sorts of things.
But you are a key part of Dragon coming up to the station
so talk a little bit about what the crew did, what your team did
down here and kind of how you guys pulled it off.
>> Melanie Miller: Well we started the day,
we started the day earlier than the crew got up
and we set everything up so
that we had two workstations operating in case one went
down the crew could do a quick switch to the other one.
And then the crew monitored the vehicle
as it got closer and closer.
We were in the background working
with the flight control team to decide if we were ready to go
for the next step to get a little bit closer.
Finally we got to 30 meters and there was a lot of discussion
about what the lighting was going to look like if we went
to what we call into the capture volume which is 5 meters
from the arm and 10 meters from station.
And we decided to go ahead and go
and so the crew did their capture at night
and the lighting turned out to be okay.
And on the ground we were setting
up for them all the cameras and things that they needed
and watching over their shoulder to make sure that the Dragon was
in the proper volume and everything looked good.
We gave them a go.
They went in and captured it pretty quickly.
And once they captured it they did a small maneuver to get
to an expected position, we called it the capture position,
and after they were done they handed it over to my team
and we maneuvered Dragon through two auto sequences
to about 150 centimeters, a meter and 1/2
from the install point.
So it was a big maneuver.
There was a lot of things going on on the ground
and on board during that time.
My team was focused on moving Dragon and at certain points
in that maneuver we would call
to the team this is the position we're at so
that they could kick off other things
like the space station maneuvering
to the install position, the whole vehicle.
And we also made a call once we finished
so that the Space X guys could roll the arrays
around to the proper position for install and we were calling
up to the crew saying hey, take a look out your window and look
at the birthing site of Dragon and inspect it
to make sure there's no damage so that we can seal up good.
So all that was going on, it was very busy on board
and on the ground and that was a change from last mission.
Because last mission we had the crew do everything
so it was all serial.
>> Josh Farley: They did everything, right?
>> Melanie Miller: Yeah they did everything last time.
This time we did a lot in parallel so it was exciting
and it went very smoothly.
>> Josh Farley: So how do you, you know it's kind of nuts
to think that you guys are
down here you know basically controlling this arm
with this big spacecraft on the end of it.
You know you can't see it.
I mean sometimes you can see it on the video monitors
but you're really just kind of trusting your training,
trusting you know the systems are going to work as expected
to so I mean what is that like as a controller
to be sitting here in Mission Control and kind
of basically flying the spacecraft
that you're not anywhere near?
>> Melanie Miller: We practice a lot doing it offline
and we design the procedures that the crew use to fly as well
and we've done that for many years.
And so now we are executing those procedures from the ground
that we have had crews for several years do so we have,
a lot of it is a lot of history background.
Sometimes you're just doing your job and it seems
like it's just a normal part of your day.
But then you realize I'm moving this huge spacecraft in space.
>> Josh Farley: And it's flying really fast.
[laughter]
>> Melanie Miller: Yeah and you need to be really,
really careful and just be at the top of your game,
watching all your data.
So even when we don't have video we do have data while we're
flying so we can see the arm joint angles and those feed
into a simulator we have that's really neat
that simulates everything on space station.
It stimulates the solar rays moving from the data.
It even simulates Dragon flying in and all the arm motion
and so, and that's all fed from real telemetry.
That same simulator is what we use to plan the trajectories
because we can actually fly it in a simulator mode
or we can have it run in a real time mode, we call it,
based on the data on board.
So we use that, sometimes we'll even put it up on the big board
when we don't have video in the control centers
so that everybody and the whole team has good situational
awareness of what's going on.
So and we train.
We have three people and there's a certain protocol
to everything we do, almost like we're in the military.
You know we take it very seriously.
We each check each other.
We check what the arm's doing and we train certain calls
that we would make if something didn't look right.
My backroom, for example,
if they see something wrong they would say stop motion or safe
and I have a command up on my display and I can click that.
What it does is it stops everything.
>> Josh Farley: Instantly.
>> Melanie Miller: Instantly,
safes the arm and everything stops.
>> Josh Farley: Whenever it comes time for Dragon
to say goodbye it's basically going
to be the process in reverse, right?
So the crews going to take care of basically uninstalling it?
Are you guys going to steer it around?
Is it going to be the same thing as last time or is it different?
>> Melanie Miller: It's different.
Last time the crew did everything.
This time the crew will participate
in unbolting the common birthing mechanism
that has Dragon attached at the node
and then we'll actually do the unbirth.
We're going to fly from that zero plane to a meter and 1/2
and then we have a big auto sequence that puts us
into the release position so we'll do all the arm maneuvering
with Dragon on the end of the arm.
Then the crew will pick up with the actual ungrapple
of Dragon we call release and the back away maneuver
because that is a time critical safety type thing
and we wouldn't want to start doing that and then lose video
from the ground for some reason so that's our plan.
>> Josh Farley: So is it fun doing this kind of job?
I mean does it ever become normal,
you know what you're doing?
I can't imagine that it does.
>> Melanie Miller: No, it's, it is fun.
Actually I think we have the best job.
And we get to train the crew before they go up.
We get to train the crew when they're on board
for doing critical operations like EBA's
or Dragon captures or releases.
And then we get to participate
in the operations while it's going on so I think
that covers the gamut.
It is an awesome privilege to be able to be certified
to do this kind of job and be selected.
>> Josh Farley: Yeah, last question for you I know
because you've got to get up there and actually talk
to the crew about these procedures here in a little bit
but you know the end of the arm, I think whenever I had to learn
about it, the thing
that surprises me is I always thought it basically kind
of you know bolted into something.
It's not, there's stairs on the end, right,
they kind of pull tight.
Matter of fact you guys are going to be pointing it
at the [inaudible] I think later on today for somebody
to take pictures of it to examine it so talk
about the mechanics of it.
It's really a very kind of smartly designed armed
by our Canadian friends.
You know talk a bit about kind of the design of it.
>> Melanie Miller: Okay so we call it, the LED is like a can.
>> Josh Farley: It's a latching end defector.
>> Melanie Miller: Yeah it's a latching end defector
and it looks a lot like a can except that it has three wires,
or we call them snares, and the can, the wires get twisted
around until they wrap around a peg called the grapple fixture
that's on Dragon.
And that peg has a head to it like a nail.
So the snares actually wrap around the pen.
>> Josh Farley: Kind of choke it.
>> Melanie Miller: And then they pull it in,
we call that the carriage.
The carriage retracts and it pulls
in until the snares are tight on that head of the nail
of the grapple fixture and pull it in tight until the face
of the can is flush up against the grapple fixture plate.
And there's a lot of tension there
and the tension is what holds it onto the arm.
>> Josh Farley: It's an incredible design.
You know it's, I think that's one of the benefits
of having something up in space.
You know I'm not sure if that would work here on earth
or whatever but it's funny
to see how big the thing actually is
at the training facilities we have here in building 9,
the space vehicle mockup facility.
I mean it's 58 feet long.
It's just huge whenever you take a look at it and the end
of it is just enormous so it's always fun
to watch the two guys do.
I wish I could go over there and do it myself.
I don't think I have the training to do it [laughter].
We should swap jobs sometime you know so, alright,
that's Melanie Miller.
I want to thank her, thank you very much for stopping by.
It's always fun to talk about this kind of stuff
and we'll be watching at the end
of the month whenever you guys get ready to release Dragon back
for its reentry back to the Pacific Ocean.
>> Melanie Miller: Yep, that will be great.
>> Josh Farley: Alright, we'll see you later.
>> Melanie Miller: Alright.