Exploration

Exploration In Focus

In Focus Research Research on Robotics Reserach on Collaborative Planning Research On Science

Converging Areas

Literary Review

An important part of our work is to understand what scientists do and
how they plan collaboratively. Literature analyses of scientific collaboration
and space planning provided the team with data on a variety of topics
relevant to science.

Science Collaboration Papers

In order to understand how scientists communicate and collaborate about data collection and findings, we read papers and found projects that incorporated science and teamwork. Much of our research comes from the Collaboratory for Research on Electronic Work (CREW). They perform large-scale field studies of how people work with new technologies in complex environments.

Collaboratory for Research on Electronic Work (CREW) papers Science of Collaboratories, describes science as a form of “distributed knowledge work” and suggests that scientists were among the first to recognize the potential of emerging information and communication
technologies. The science of collaboratories aim to define, abstract, and codify the broad underlying technical and social elements that lead to successful collaboratories. They seek to synthesize the vocabulary, associated principles, design methods, and technical infrastructure for propagating and sustaining collaboratories across a wide range of circumstances. Their
goal is for users with a need for collaboratory infrastructure to be able to create successful collaboratories on their own. One papers comes from space collaboration monitoring remote sets of instruments and another argues the importance of effective CSCW systems to support data sharing work in science and engineering groups.

    Insights:

  • Asynchronous collaboration reduces the cost of accessing complementary expertise (e.g., bringing together the radar experts with the optical experts), partly by relieving scheduling difficulties and the strain of travel.
  • It is important to understand the scientists’ intent for sharing work collaboratively.
  • The ability to share data is critical to the validation and progress of science.
  • Data sharing and reuse in some fields, however, has proven to be a difficult problem.
  • Data plays two roles in scientific communities: They serve as evidence to support scientific inquiry, and make a social contribution to the establishment and maintenance of communities of practice.
  • We must support social interaction around data abstractions, reach beyond current metadata models, and support the social roles of data.

Interviews and Contextual Inquiries

In researching the different areas, we found that some interviews cutting across multiple areas were most relevant to our foci. The sources come from the scientists using rovers to discover life in a Chilean desert and scientists who are currently planning missions with the MER.

NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover

The Mars Exploration Rover (MER) Mission, part of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program, was kicked off in summer of 2003 when two twin robotic geologists, Spirit and Opportunity, were launched towards Mars. The primary goal of the mission is to search for rocks and soils that could indicate to a history of water on Mars. A team of Engineers located at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California work with the input of scientists remotely located across the globe to plan activities for the rovers in order to gain scientific knowledge of Mars. The MER mission was only expected to last 90 days (this is referred to as the Primary Mission at JPL) because it was thought that the rovers would deteriorate under the harsh Martian conditions. Originally, all of the scientists and engineers involved in MER were co-located at JPL and essentially worked together in one room. After it became apparent that the rovers would not fail in such a short amount of time, the scientists went to their home locations and now, two years into the mission, they work remotely from different locations around the world.

The scientists and engineers have to work together to achieve science goals while still keeping the rover functioning. They have to consider constraints such as solar power limitations, time restrictions, and data space available onboard the rover. The rover sleeps at night and for portions of the day in order to reserve battery power and it does the majority of its activities during the day while the sun is out and it can use solar power to recharge. There is also a limited amount of data space on the rover’s onboard flash so whatever data cannot be downlinked on a given day is kept onboard the rover to be retrieved another day. Because of these downlink restrictions, there is a limited amount of space for the rover to store new images and critical sensory data, which are used for navigation of the rover, have downlink priority over science data.

Our research group made two trips to JPL in order to observe the planning process for MER. We observed four meetings, one work session, and conducted one interview:

  • Science Operations Working Group (SOWG) meeting
  • Preplanning Meeting
  • APAM Meeting
  • Integrated Sequencing Team (IST) work session
  • Interview with Keeper of Plan (KOP)