Human Systems Integration Division @ NASA Ames

Safety and mission critical anomalies are inevitable on NASA exploration missions. Delays and interruptions in communication with Earth-experts drives the requirement that crew resolve these anomalies on their own. The Human Factors and Behavioral Performance (HFBP) element of the NASA Human Research Program (HRP) recently stood-up the Human-System Integration Architecture (HSIA) risk. The specific risk statement is: "Given decreasing real-time ground support for execution of complex operations during future exploration missions, there is a possibility of adverse performance outcomes including that crew are unable to adequately respond to unanticipated critical malfunctions or detect safety critical procedural errors." Reliable, on-board capabilities will need to support the crew - not only to resolve anomalies, but also to promote situation awareness (SA) and to reduce workload. Unfortunately, the present level of technological advancement limits the range of achievable intelligent support (Wu & Vera, 2019). The Human Capabilities Assessment for Autonomous Missions (HCAAM) projects were devised to identify how technology may benefit crew situation awareness and enhance crew trust in the intelligent systems. A suite of time-critical and complex exploration tasks have been identified (Holden et al., 2019) that may advance human-integration Concept of Operations (ConOps) development. This ConOps (a future HFBP directed task) along with standards and guidelines (Holden et al., 2019) may be used as the foundation for human-system requirements for a self-reliant crew. Spaceflight CO2 levels are elevated relative to terrestrial levels. Above 2.5 mmHg there is an increase in the incidence of crew headaches (Law et al., 2014) and Mission Control reports of mood and performance changes in the crew. The concern is that elevated CO2 effects may exacerbate the HSIA risk. Unfortunately, effects of higher concentrations of CO2 on performance decrements are not well established. The main goal of the current report is to identify how elevated CO2 impacts the HSIA risk. The approach taken is to trace the relationship between cognitive and motor abilities required for anomaly response with critical mission tasks and the level of technological advancement to support anomaly resolution to identify how elevated CO2 may impact the HSIA risk. The conclusion is that elevated CO2 could exacerbate the HSIA risk. Several research gaps are identified.