Operations Assistants for Johnson Space Center’s Mission Control Center

Abstract

The Mission Operations Directorate (MOD) at JSC is responsible for the planning and conduct of human space flight missions. MOD is being challenged with developing and sustaining new operations capabilities to support the growth in existing programs and to enable the advent of the human exploration missions. Mission operations are becoming increasingly distributed due to the growth in international participation and the expanded involvement of the scientific, academic, and industrial communities. Flight controllers are challenged by new roles and complex operational scenarios such as multi-vehicle control, long distances, and extended duration operations. Support for long distance exploration missions will require a shift in real-time control from the ground to onboard the spacecraft due to the inherent communications delays. In addition, MOD is continuously seeking to improve its processes to accomplish missions at higher levels of safety, mission success, and effectiveness. Automation is being considered as an enabling technology to meet the aforementioned challenges. The synergistic combination of flight controllers and intelligent software providing the function of Operations Assistants is being pursued as the key implementation of this technology in the Mission Control Center (MCC).