While setting an objective is one thing, achieving your target is quite another matter – especially when researchers at Ames face the pressure of working at one of the US’s most important scientific laboratories.

Despite the targets and high pressures, Ames’ scientists have been successfully supporting space exploration work since the agency was created in 1958.

Researchers have worked on the management of the 1976 Viking life detection spacecraft sent to Mars, the first to perform experiments on another planet, and most recently the Lunar Prospector mission, which discovered ice at the poles of the moon.

When Ames’ researchers were called upon to build the software for controlling Spirit and Opportunity, the rovers sent to discover evidence of water on the surface of Mars, they had to create a system that would allow the mission’s scientists to use the robots to extract geological and chemical data.

The system also had to be capable of sending movement commands to the rovers, and of allowing photographs taken by the vehicles to be accessed by the public relations team.

Specialists from very different professional and scientific backgrounds needed to work together on technology that would function intuitively, to help Nasa plan and operate the rover’s tasks in the most efficient way.

The task of creating a system to enable such collaboration was given to Ames’ Intelligent Systems Division User Centred Design group, led by computer expert and Nasa veteran Jay Trimble.

‘We were observing the work being done by the different mission teams for the Mars exploration rovers, the geologists, the atmosphere people, and the long-term planners,’ he says.

‘We had been watching them train and seeing their field tests, and we felt we could add capabilities that would help those teams work together in a more seamless way.’

But it quickly became clear to Trimble and his team that they were not tackling the task of creating a new system in the best way possible.

‘We had modes – “Now I’m in a browser, now in a white board, now I’m in a planning tool” – and the isolation of each bit of functionality became very clear,’ he says.

‘There was no way we could mix things to freely build software to best support the way the users would be conducting their tasks. We had certain methods for saying: “Here’s the workflow, and here’s the taskflow”.’

Faced with limited resources and time, the group hit upon the idea of going to IBM, whose Almaden research centre is close to Ames in Silicon Valley.

‘I really felt like we had shared issues with them. IBM is a large organisation that has put a substantial effort into ease of use,’ says Trimble.

‘I only had a small group to do user-centred work, whereas IBM puts a lot of resources into that area.

‘So we went to them to ask for their experience and insights on how to make systems that are designed around the user, and on how these methodologies can be put out into a large organisation in practice.’

The results were immediate.

Trimble says Dan Russell, the senior manager of the User Sciences and Experience group for IBM, and his team changed the way Ames’ User Centred Design group created applications.

‘We were building our software with the same restrictions that the rest of the world has,’ he says.

‘We were just building applications and we had the feeling that was limiting us, because it meant that we tended to isolate little elements of functionality into one bit of software.’

Trimble says an individual using a word processor, for example, has access to a range of built-in functions.

Such functionality is only available within that particular application, despite similar attributes often being replicated across many different systems.

In a similar vein, Trimble says his team probably has access to about 10 different sets of tools to edit documents.

‘Those tool palettes look the same across all those different applications – what we wanted was to be able to compose and assemble the tools the Mars rover team needed from different bits of software to support user tasks,’ he says.

‘We used IBM’s insight to help us break down those walls. Without them I don’t think the project would have been possible. They were fantastic and a huge help to us.’

The outcome of the Ames and IBM collaboration was MERBoard: 18 large plasma screens with touch sensitive overlays that allow users to track their requests for data from the Mars rovers.

MERBoard offers services including sequencing commands to make the rover gather data, sending instructions to Mars, transferring information back to Earth, and processing data to produce meaningful results.

The project has gained such positive reviews that Trimble is now looking to take the MERBoard concept further, beginning with a pilot stage project to use the same user-centred ideas to build a system for helping to run the International Space Station’s (ISS) mission control centre in Houston, Texas.

‘For the Mars rover project we were really an enhancement tool rather than a critical path system.

‘For the ISS, we are taking the infrastructure for collaboration that we created with MERBoard and we are using it to store files, share files and replicate screens,’ he says.

‘The ISS will hopefully be using it to share planning information, schedule activities for what the crew is doing – and they will also hopefully use it for international and remote planning conferences with a built in voice element.

‘I hope it will allow station planners worldwide to use the tools they already have to help plan ISS’s activities better.’

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