Telescience Enlarges Limited Resources of Station Crew

Frank Morring, Jr. / Washington

Improving the ability of scientists on the ground to operate experiments on the International Space Station could help ease the manpower crunch in orbit, where station crewmembers have been spending less than 20 hr. a week on the science ISS was built to serve.

"Telescience" already plays a big role on the ISS, but telecommunications technology exists -- or soon will -- that could give ground-based researchers an even larger role in running orbiting experiments. Based on the Internet and emerging broadband satellite businesses, the capability would come in particularly handy if ongoing number crunching at NASA finds there won't be enough funding to expand the crew from three to seven members as originally planned.

"I don't want to say this is a solution for the lack of astronaut time for the science," said Larty Smarr, a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of California, San Diego. "I'm just saying here's a possible avenue to explore to see if we can squeeze more science productivity out of the astronaut time we have to work with. If we could get 30% or 40% improvement, for instance, that's a lot of science that wouldn't be done otherwise."

Smarr, who is both director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology and a member of the NASA Advisory Council (NAC), has pushed the idea in the NAC of bringing the Internet into station telescience in a bigger way; Administrator Sean O'Keefe has ordered a briefing on the subject at the next NAC meeting, Smarr said.

Meanwhile, the U.S. space agency is gearing up for a major restructuring of the science program on the station as it wrestles with a funding shortfall of at least $4.8 billion. NASA's Office of Biological and Physical Research is awaiting the final report, due July 10, of an outside panel set up to recommend research priorities on ISS. Many of those priorities will be tackled by remote control using hardware already developed.

NASA has been pursuing telescience since the program's inception and has already developed and deployed ground-based Telescience Research Kit (TREK) workstations," said Mary Kicza, the associate administrator for Biological and Physical Research. "These capabilities will be applied to the maximum practical extent to increase the amount of research we can conduct on board the International Space Station."

The problem is complicated by a heavy assembly schedule in 2003, when science gear will compete for space in the cargo bay with outside truss segments and the crew will be busy reconfiguring the station to accommodate the new elements. "It's going to be very tough to get the science done in the way we've been able to do in 2002 and in the earlier years," said William H. Gerstenmaier, who takes over this month as station program manager.

Space station crews have been con- ducting science since the first expedition boarded in 2000, and the pace of research has gradually quickened. Kicza told the NAC last month that crewmembers had managed to start 57 scientific investigations with the seven experiment racks available. Many of those experiment have already been completed, she said. By early next year three more research racks are scheduled to have been installed, and the total number of experiments completed or underway on ISS should reach about 70, she said (AW&ST June 17, p. 36).

Science activities on the station are coordinated through the Payload Operations Center (POC) at Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama. Tim Horvath, the payload operations director there, said station crews have been averaging 14-17 hr. a week of hands-on science time as they push for a target of 20 hr. a week. Horvath said researchers have been encouraged to do as much remote monitoring and controlling as they can, either from the PC, from telescience centers at other NASA facilities or from their own laboratories using dedicated lines or the Internet to tap into the NASA system. But there are many experiment-related tasks that require the services of a crewmember.

"Plant growth experimenters can reset their temperatures, their humidities, turn the lights on and off for the plants," Horvath said. "They can't do all of their water refill operations, and obviously they can't harvest their plants remotely, but a great number of the normal everyday tasks they would have to do to maintain their experiments [can be done] from the ground."

Some types of experiments, such as crystal growth studies, lend themselves to remote control, while others -- biomedical procedures that require manipulation of specimens -- do not. Communications with the station is intermittent, as the antennas on board are eclipsed by the Earth, the solar arrays and other parts of the station itself. Just how often there is a loss of signal depends on the station's attitude mode, Horvath said, but overall the S-band link used to send commands up to the station is available about 60% of the time, while the Ku-band downlink that carries scientific results is available about 40-50% of the time.

Expanding station connectivity beyond the government's Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System (TDRSS) to the broadband commercial Ka-band services just coming on line could widen the communications bottleneck, provided security and other issues are addressed. But even with the present system, there is the potential for greater use of t4e Internet to link scientists with on-board payloads.

"Access to communications links and what's going to happen from a network topology perspective relative to the space station itself is a discussion for NASA," said Rick Sanford, director, global space initiatives, at Cisco Global Defense and Space Group in Herndon, Va. "But the back-end networking systems, the IP [Internet Protocol] infrastructure associated with that, can absolutely be architected based on the business needs and a change in the business process to accommodate these drops in signals. It's really about a merged space and ground infrastructure to be able to support those types of capabilities."

Advisory council member Smarr said he hasn't seen evidence NASA is taking the possibilities of the Internet for telescience into account in the development of the space station, even though "it's not like the Internet hasn't been here." But he was encouraged by O'Keefe's reaction to his questioning at the last NAC meeting.

"I think the new NASA administrator seemed to get it," Smarr said. "What he said is 'I haven't appreciated that if we don't have the bandwidth there, we're artificially limiting the kinds of experiments or the kind of approaches that we take to doing science on the space station.' If an investigator gets the specs, whatever they are, and there's not much bandwidth, then he'll say 'I'll just design the experiment [without relying on] interactive Internet.'"