Posts Tagged ‘Science Metrics’

This was my first Deepworker flight since last year, and I was pleased that flying the submersibles came back similar to skiing or riding a bicycle. We have been planning the science and operational metrics for this expedition for many months now, and it was both fun and exciting to get back into the water and execute the plan for real. I was constantly marveling at how cool it was to be seeing things that human eyes have never seen before, like exploring Mars or time warping back to pre-Cambrian oceans with today’s technology. It was great to be back working with the PLRP team, an extremely talented group that work together seamlessly to execute some very complex operations, which are helping us understand the optimal blending of science and operations in hostile environments as we get ready for the coming decades of planetary exploration.

The objectives of my dive today included contour mapping a part of the central basin that we have not seen before at 30 meters and 15 meters. It’s both challenging and fun to fly these contours. One of the more challenging aspects to learn was learning to fly only with my feet. The right foot is used to control direction and the left foot controls depth. With your left foot, push down with your right toe and you go forward, down with the right heel and you go backwards, twist right to turn right, twist left to turn left. With your right foot, push down with your left toe to dive, right heel to ascend. Then you blend all of those inputs to fly around various microbialite structures and contact lines, while simultaneously using your right hand to control the manipulator arm that positions the camera and your left had to operate the camera zoom and/ or the sonar, all the time while making observations and narrating into a voice recorder. If it sounds like a heavy workload, it is, and one of the things we are doing this year for the first time at PLRP is recording subjective human factors of the workload to compare with the quality of the objective and subjective data. By doing this, we will understand if factors like pilot fatigue play a role in the quality of science and exploration data obtained from the subs. In addition to be ground breaking science on earth, all of this contributes to the effort to help design the human factors of next generation of planetary surface exploration vehicles that optimize our ability to perform planetary exploration.

-Mike