>> And now we'll take a moment to look at the future of human space flight
with simulation of an asteroid mission.
We'll go to the facility at the Johnson Space Center where that's taking place
with Public Affairs Officer Brandi Dean.
>> Good morning, welcome to the Space Vehicle Mockup Facility, or Building 9,
as it's known here at Johnson Space Center.
We've got some interesting activities going on here today,
a simulation of a mission to an asteroid.
If you are regularly watching the ISS update, you know that a lot of what we do is
to get ready for future exploration, and this is another activity that goes on here
at Johnson Space Center to help us get ready.
And to tell us about today, we've got astronaut Mike Gernhardt here.
Thanks for coming, Mike.
>> Great. Well, it's nice to be here, and what we're doing, it's very interesting,
it's what's we call a three-day integrated asteroid simulation, and we're doing it
with the space exploration vehicle, which, some of you know, started life as a lunar rover,
and then it's morphed into an in-space vehicle.
We replaced the chassis --
>> The wheels, right?
>> The wheels with a reaction-controlled jet system.
And so we've worked with the engineering team here at NASA
and we have developed this really great integrated sim where we're actually living
in the generation 2A space exploration vehicle, and we have an asteroid sim,
and we have that projected on a big screen in front of the cabin,
so we're actually flying around the asteroid.
We have to find some standard protocols where we do what we call the near-field survey, which is,
we fly all the way around it at 30 to 50 meters off the surface.
And then we have this 100-foot diameter area of geological interest, and we simulated sampling
with six cones, so we actually have to fly the vehicle and the arm on the end
of it up and touch the six cones.
And we're measuring handling qualities of the vehicle, we're looking at prop usage,
we're looking at the, viewing out the windows, the kinds of rendezvous tools we need.
>> They're actually living in the cabin.
>> They are living in the cabin for three days, because we just finished building the cabin 2A,
and we want to shake it out, what's good about it, what's bad it, you know,
what it's like to live and work until the cabin.
>> Okay. And so now you've lived in the cabin before, not this particular cabin, right.
This is a new version of it.
>> Well, I've lived in the 1A and the 1B up to two weeks, and in December I lived in this cabin
for three days doing a similar sim to what we're doing today.
>> Okay, okay.
Well, how is it?
What does it feel like?
>> It is really cool.
The asteroid sim is very high fidelity,
and we've integrated the SAFER jet packs from the virtual reality lab.
>> Explain what SAFER is.
>> So SAFER is a jet pack that we use on Space Station if we should fall off
and break our tether, it's a way to fly back with cold gas propellant.
And we have a virtual reality lab where we can fly these SAFERs around in that environment.
And we've managed to co-sync the SAFER sim with the MMSEV sim.
So we have one crew member on a jet pack flying around while the vehicle is monitoring him
and may be coming in and rendezvousing with him while he gets in the arm to do samples.
So we're really getting a very high fidelity dynamics understanding
of what it's like to work on an asteroid.
And then we're able to start spinning the asteroid at different rates
and see what that does to your workload --
>> Because we don't know what asteroid we're going to yet, or how --
>> We don't know exactly what asteroid we're going to yet, and we're trying to develop a set
of tools that will allow us to optimize the hardware depending
on the characteristics of the asteroid.
>> Um-hum, okay.
Well, we're going to be talking with some more people later in the hour and we'll be
over by the cabin that the crew is living in.
But can you tell us a little bit about what we've got behind us here right now?
>> Yeah, so the other thing that we're doing is every time we get out of the vehicle,
we are getting into a suit through the suit port.
>> A space suit.
This is our generation 2 suit for you, and we're trying to evaluate the mechanics
and the human factors of those suit ports.
So we typically will do three short EVAs a day,
so we're getting out of the vehicle three times a day.
Some of the times we go up to the SAFER VR Lab, and the rest of the time we come
over to this ARGOS facility which is -- it's basically a gravity offload system.
>> Okay.
>> It's an electromechanical control system.
You get in the harness.
We've got a number of different sampling tasks with rocks here.
We're evaluating different translation lines, lightweight booms that we anchor
and then move the other end, kind of inchworm around it and so forth.
>> Okay.
>> And so we have a standard protocol that we're doing here that we actually did at NEEMO 15,
so we collected data from under the water and that environment, which might be somewhat biased
by the drag of this constantly, the water,
and so we're repeating those same tests here with ARGO.
So they will do a six-sample collection task here and deploy a seismic instrument.
>> So it looks like they're getting set up to do the next run now.
Maybe if we draw it out a little bit, we'll get to see a little bit of it.
>> Maybe you'll get to see some of the suit up.
>> Yeah, but, so this is one of, a suite of the different ways that NASA looks
at how we would explore an asteroid, right?
>> Exactly.
And we're looking at, you know, all aspects of that from the robotic precursor to,
you know, the infrastructure that we need.
And right now, our basic plans are to have a deep space habitat that we actually travel
to the asteroid in, and then once we get there,
we would transfer into the smaller space exploration vehicle and then excur occur
over to the asteroid and stay there for a week.
And the reason we do that is that it actually takes a lot of prop to get
from the deep space habitat to the asteroid if you want to go there fast,
and then if you come back, you have to take all that energy out.
So it's much more sensible to go over there and stay there for a week.
So what we're doing in the simulation is trying to create a high fidelity sim
of what the operation really looks like.
>> Um-hum.
>> That helps us do the habitability analysis of the cabin.
Because if you were just sitting in the cabin, you know,
playing Parcheesi all day, that's not flight-like.
And so, you know, we have a very tight timeline from morning until night
where we're flying the near-field survey.
We do the ARGOS, we do the SAFER.
We've got a bunch of other stuff we're doing inside the vehicle.
So to a crew member, it feels a lot like an asteroid mission.
You know, on top of that, we're simulating the time delay associated
with the 50 seconds each way that it would take to talk to the ground --
>> It would take their voice, if we send something up, that long to get to the crew
in space because it's so far away.
>> It would take that long to get to the crew in space.
And so we really need to understand what that means to how we manage our operations,
how we manage our systems and so forth.
And so what our whole team is trying to do is understand that whole mission at a nuts
and bolts level, and not at an architectural level, but at the nuts
and bolts, how you would really execute it.
And from that knowledge, we can then design the right hardware from the beginning instead
of having, you know, develop this hardware and then you start doing some ops with it
and you say, I don't like, I don't like that.
>> You don't want to get the asteroid and figure out you don't have the right tools.
>> Exactly.
>> Okay.
>> So we're working years ahead of that to understand those things.
>> Well, along that line, I guess this is Jose Hurtado who is getting set up,
a geologist with the University in El Paso, right?
>> Exactly, yeah.
>> So why have a geologist involved?
>> That's a good question.
I actually lived in the rover with Jose a couple of summers ago,
and we're trying to really understand, and we do this at Desert RATS, but we do real geology.
And we actually have metrics
where the professional geologists score how productive we are and the conclusions we reach
so we can evaluate different combinations of cameras and tools and so forth.
And so I think it's very important to engage the scientific community in this evolving process
so that we can, you know, really do the best science we can when we get there.
>> Okay. And the other half of the crew this time is astronaut Alvin Drew.
>> Exactly.
>> And we also want the astronaut perspective, I'm sure.
>> Absolutely.
And so that's what we've done traditionally in Desert RATS is team an astronaut
up with a professional geologist, and that kind of helps us learn geology, which, you know,
that's kind of where the astronaut obviously is going is to become, you know,
an observational scientist as well as an astronaut.
Because any one of these exploration missions, whether it be the moon, Mars,
meteors and so forth, we're going to need to become good observational scientists.
And the scientists say that we're actually the best scientific instrument they have.
And so we're trying to get that cultural change from, you know, test pilots and farm operators
and very procedure-oriented folks to do more of the operational observational science.
>> All right, well lots of cool stuff going on there.
>> You bet, you bet.
>> Okay. Thanks so much for talking with us.
>> Okay. Nice to see you.
>> Okay, and this is all part of the RATS, or Research
and Technology Studies series of tests that we do.
So if you want to go and find out more online, you can visit NASA.gov/desertrats.
Again, that's NASA.gov/desertrats, and we'll go back to Kiley [phonetic] for now,
but be back to talk to a few more members of the team later.
Thanks so much.