Improving astronaut team performance during Lunar operations
Katya Arquilla is leading a major new NASA grant to mitigate the negative effects of communication delays on the performance of distributed teams for upcoming missions on the surface of the Moon.
Arquilla has earned a five-year, $1.5 million grant through NASA’s 2024 Human Exploration Research Opportunities program. With it, she is leading a multidisciplinary team to investigate countermeasures for radio transmission lags between the Earth and Moon as well as the length of time it takes astronauts to mentally process new instructions and act on them.
“There are communication delays inherent in lunar operations, not just due to the time it takes for a message to travel from Earth to the Moon, but also because of the time it takes people to work through their comprehension of task requirements and their environment. The delays are 5-14 seconds as a baseline, and it only goes up from there,” Arquilla said.
An assistant professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder, Arquilla works in bioastronautics, particularly how humans interact with and adapt to complex systems.
NASA is planning an array of lengthy Moon missions over the next decade, potentially including a permanent base near the lunar south pole. Construction of such a facility and subsequent science missions will require long and complicated extravehicular activities, or moon walks, by astronauts. Such efforts can be trying under the best of conditions, and could be even more complex when astronauts are trying to follow elaborate instructions from team members in another location on the Moon or back on Earth.
“Communications become a real stressor if there is any lag time that causes overlapping communications or excessive wait time that wastes resources,” Arquilla said. “We are developing countermeasures to fill that lag time with productive actions, using approaches like autonomous chat bots and automated prompts that guide the human through aspects of the reasoning process.”
To test these countermeasures, the research team will develop a laboratory-based mission analog that will include distributed teams performing realistic tasks in a mockup habitat, rover, and mission control center with integrated communication delays. During testing, participants’ cognitive load and team performance will be measured with physiological sensors.
Following testing of potential countermeasures in the Bioastronautics Laboratory, the team will select the most promising solutions for full field tests at NASA’s Human Exploration Research Analog facility in Houston, Texas, where scientists conduct simulated space missions.
The project features researchers from multiple laboratories at CU Boulder as well as the Colorado School of Mines. In addition to Arquilla, the team includes Torin Clark and Allie Hayman, also from Smead Aerospace, Leanne Hirshfield from CU Boulder’s Institute of Cognitive Science, and Tom Williams from the Colorado School of Mines.
“This may be one of the first projects to do this kind of comprehensive distributed team simulation in the laboratory, and it’s a really cool collaborative opportunity that is going to be a great challenge. Good ideas don’t happen in a vacuum—we have a strong Bioastronautics team and collaborators with expertise in computer science and human cognition that led to our selection for this award,” Arquilla said.
Developing communications systems to help astronauts work better on the Moon could have an array of future benefits.
“It’s about improving communications during maintenance tasks, but also in problem situations that could threaten the rest of the crew when seconds count,” Arquilla said. “But anytime astronauts are outside the capsule, wearing a bulky space suit is a high stress, demanding situation. This is something that can make for a better experience.”