New Human-Computer Interface Concepts for Mission Operations

The current climate of budget cuts has forced the space mission operations community to reconsider how it does business. Gone are the days of building one-of-kind control centers with teams of controllers working in shifts 24 hours per day, 7 days per week. Increasingly, automation is used to significantly reduce staffing needs. In some cases, missions are moving towards lights-out operations where the ground system is run semi-autonomously. On-call operators are brought in only to resolve anomalies. Some operations concepts also call for smaller operations teams to manage an entire family of spacecraft. In the not too distant future, a skeleton crew of full-time general knowledge operators will oversee the operations of large constellations of small spacecraft, while geographically distributed specialists will be assigned to emergency response teams based on their expertise. As the operations paradigms change, so too must the tools to support the mission operations team's tasks. Tools need to be built not only to automate routine tasks, but also to communicate varying types of information to the part-time, generalist, or on-call operators and specialists more effectively. Thus, the proper design of a system's user-system interface (USI) becomes even more importance than before. Also, because the users will be accessing these systems from various locations (e.g., control center, home, on the road) via different devices with varying display capabilities (e.g., workstations, home PCs, PDAS, pagers) over connections with various bandwidths (e.g., dial-up 56k, wireless 9.6k), the same software must have different USIs to support the different types of users, their equipment, and their environments. In other words, the software must now adapt to the needs of the users! This paper will focus on the needs and the challenges of designing USIs for mission operations. After providing a general discussion of these challenges, the paper will focus on the current efforts of creatin(y an effective USI for one specific suite of tools, SERS (The Spacecraft Emergency Response System), which has been built to enable lights-out operations. SERS is a Web-based collaborative environment that enables secure distributed fault management.