NEEMO Lessons

Learned

Background• See earlier presentation and website

2

Roles• NOAA

• operations director/manager (Saul)• safety/watch directors (Roger, Otter, James) - report to

operations director, everyone else reports to these folks• boat captain (Otto)• watchdesk (Otter)• topside support divers (Jason, Ryan, Justin, Joe, Brad)--

these guys also double up with watchdesk night shifts• FSU diver• FSU interns (2)• navy medical divers (2)• crew: lead habtech and habtech (also 1 & 2) (James,

Nate)• network (Dom)

3

Roles• NASA

• Project/Mission Manager, Mission Director (Bill)• MM2 (Monika)• support/utility divers (Brian, Jason, Juniper, Nick)• crew: cdr, ms1, ms2, ms3 (Chris, Tom, Steve, Andrew)• PI POC (Pam)• PI POC 2 (Adrian)• PI tech support (Adrian)• MCC owner (Mike D.)• MCC second (Mark)• MCC intern (Isaac)• HRP reps (Roger J., Rene)- onsite PIs (Marc, Mike G., Nick)• CG PI 1 (Mike G.)• CG PI 2 (Nick)• CAPCOM (Zane, Peggy, Chris Looper)• Data (Lesley)• EPO (Heather, Amanda)• geoscientist (Mary Sue)• outside hab cam controls (Mary Sue)• photographer (Karl)• visitors/stakeholders (Aaron, Doug)

4

Physical Setup• NURC, condos, MMCC (see google maps, PDF

of MMCC layout)

5

Mission Flow• Generally much more hectic in earlier part of

the mission especially this way for the planner • Training week and first week most intense

• Installing SPIFe on topside and crew computers• Making changes to the schedule (breaking up

activities)• Walking through the schedule with stakeholders

6

Nominal Day• Morning Team Tagup followed by DPC

• morning is usually quicker with MM giving status on today's weather conditions and boat assignments, potting boats

• capcom usually gives status on things that have been going on and plans for the day

• EVAs during the day (crew performs, MCC supports)

• Evening Team Tagup followed by DPC• end of day DPCs start with CDR talking about how

day went, status of science activities (including surveys) of what they completed

7

Users of SPIFe• MCC

• Me• Drudgery saving tasks• SVN

• CAPCOM• Mostly just tracked activities

• Geoscientist• Took notes on activities in the “Doc Notes”

attribute

8

Planner Observations• Clone was useful for splitting activities [td1]

• Split would be a useful feature (1 activity with multiple resources multiple activities with one resource) [td1]

• All forms of time is important: day of week, mission day, calendar date (day of week is lacking in this version of SPIFe) [md9 heather asked about friday, had to fig out it was md12]

• Need to use crew's names in schedule as well [email]

9

Issues Over Time• Overlap stops working - Timeline activities that

get moved around or copied and pasted on one another are placed behind or on top of other activities in same time slot [td1]

• Duration not updated in timeline; Sometimes immediately after opening up a plan, duration field does not update. Only once has save/reopen not worked either [td4, md2 for multiple activities]• verify the duration bug by opening up a product

on trunk and doing same steps there as here

10

Issues• Clock and Red Current Time stop working - on (at

least) 2 computers sometimes the time stops (noticeable in the Clock view), and at the same time the Red Current Time is in some time location usually 3-4 hours out [md8] [at various times all computers, zane (can see log), mine, backroom MCC]

• Plan Diff not using IDs

• EnsembleApplication.log file gets cut off at some point in time and file gets written over

• Deselect workspace bug

11

Features (1/2)• MissionElapsedTime > MET - "MissionElapsedTime"

takes up too much real estate [tom ms1, jsc]

• MET needs to day break based on the next time zone - Any other time zone than GMT causes MET to break up days in places other than 12am midnight (eg for EST, day ends at 19:00) [td2]

• MET should always be on a 24 hour clock and not be in "elapsed time" during premission days - training days were off and I had to reset the Mission Time in order to get something implementable [training wk]

12

Features (2/2)• Checkbox option for having a day 0 or not (no 0 here)

[creating training plan td2]

• Save a copy - The problem with Save As is that it points the schedule to the new file, which would be problematic if the file is on the shared server that people are accessing [mike g md2]

• Synchronization of clock views (clocks among all computers) [md2]

• Ability to link multiple procedures [pam md2, also andrew mentioned during training]

• Cmd-A for Search View - when changing the description of activities, I would find that only part of them are changed [md6]

13

Misc Mission Lessons• Training Week

• Need to create a training plan before training week in KL so that crew can get used to looking at schedule in native tool asap [td2]

• Mission Itself• We're not always going to get immediate answers to our questions from the crew [md4

working with zane]• CAPCOM's role is a merge of CAPCOM and Flight Director in this mission [md5]

• DPC• CAPCOM usually asks all teams if they have any updates for the crew [md1]• Conversations are muted when there is side discussions for both ends

• Mission Planning• MM noticed that while request was valid for crew to switch up teams with diving, it was

hard to reconcile these configurations if all tasks hadn't been finished for the first day [md5]

• Setting up for crew as user• Put crew names instead of roles (chris email/incident log)- Spell out entire activity (don't

use abbreviations or acronyms) [tom td6]

14

Misc Lessons• SPIFe stickers or some kind of physical tag

(useful for putting on computer, I did email Adrian our logo to put on their desktop) [training week setup]

15

Planner Role• Planner needs to be the integrator and help walk through how crew

would use the tool, referencing procedures through the tool [td4]

• Need to convince crew about pushing certain things to get things done (such as walking through the plan) [plan walkthrough td5]

• Need to tell people for getting information to the crew to get planner info in advance (people were actually good about this, but it probably would've been nice to get this to me in advance) [epos were all good about this]

• On a daily basis, need to give update and flag team in tagup for anything out of the norm, any changes the next day (eg earlier DPC, or a switch in pairings for dives) [md5]

• Need to scrub plan to make sure all procedures linked correctly and all names are correct from a user's point of view [md5]

16

Procedures• Procedures for crew need to be as mission specific and relevant as

possible. Imagine the crew will get into a situation where they don't know what to do and they bring it up in the DPC. You should be able to reference the procedure or a part of it to point them in the right direction so that on-the-fly procedures are not being created [td3, md2]

• Procedures need to have right amount of detail• (note that procedures for paths to the shared drive are also written

by others like Mark Seibert, second MCC IT guy for the DVC procedures; should standardize the way these are written) [DVC procedures]

• also, how many steps are needed to tell someone how to save, another reason why we need a consistent and concise way of writing procedures [md3 me]

• Don't put too much bolding as that indicates something is very important [md3 peggy]

17

Analog vs. Spaceflight• In spaceflight you cannot schedule activities in

post- and pre-sleep, but here, you need it scheduled in to remind the crew to do certain activities upon wakeup or before sleep [tom td6 vs. chris md??]

• In spaceflight, no gaps in timeline [md4 zane]

18

Users of SPIFe• Crew

• Mostly used to view activities coming up• Referenced procedures (cdr, hab1)• Looked up EPO information• (show specific feedback from cdr and ms1)

19

Crew Feedback• Most important thing is for everything to be on the timeline; secondary is

linking procedures (since they can always talk to PIs, as is on ISS) [td4 chris]

• An alarm for time sensitive activities such as telecons ... push to outlook or have alarms (alarms on pinned activities?) [td4 chris num thai]

• There's a need for a viewer that automatically synchronizes new procedures and timeline updates [md1, chris, log, current-time missing] [tom, log, procedures missing] [md6 chris v12 wasn't on drive yet]• (interesting design issue of a timeline of the timeline, querying for an

activity that was missing (bill on td6))

• Need a "today" or "now" button that's not as modal as follow current time [md4 zane]

• Start/stop time not really viable for logging science of actual time duration of activities [md5 chris] [tom]

20

Post Mission Words• CDR – “We would have been lost without SPIFe”

• Job Jars might be more useful if was always “popped up”

• Used 5-6x/day to check stuff up• Mentioned OSTPV functionality being a tool that

evolved over many iterations

• MS2 & MS3 – used SPIFe to scan schedule, would remind other people of their activities, looked at paper or electronic procedures depending on what was more convenient, never used SPIFe on their personal computers

• HabTech 1 – Says most useful thing about SPIFe was for viewing procedures

21

Mission Culture• NEEMO is a collaboration between two big organizations, NOAA and NASA. NOAA

funds NURC, which always has the final call on the way things are going. Which makes sense since NASA is basically renting from NURC. [td1]

• PI POC - in charge of SPIFe's money, therefore feels responsibility of all thing related to SPIFe whether it's the planner's communication with capcom [md9]

• Planner needs to run requests through PI POC who is managing all other PI requests and therefore is more inclined to reject requests from reasons ranging from funding, lack of experience, competition with other project

• Crew (esp. astronaut) buy-in is important, they did not have to use SPIFe [td5] [md1-3]

• CAPCOM is main MCC POC (PI POC told CAPCOM when leaving and would have cell on) [md5]

• EPO is respectful of science and oks that ETag is being worn during interview [md5]

22

General Impressions• Everybody liked SPIFe a lot – MM, PI POC, crew,

PIs, EPO

23

Questions?