An experiment on skill degradation and recovery for safe MSS operations

Summary form only given. SMP is a research project to study how skills degrade and recovery. The operation of the wide variety of manned and unmanned space vehicles and their associated supporting docking and robotics systems calls for demanding training of crews both on ground and on orbit. Crew must achieve and maintain proficiency in these complex skills. Failure to maintain critical skill proficiency places the lives of the crew and the various space assets at significant risk. Canada has a significant investment in space activity via our contribution of Astronauts and robotics hardware and software. Skills degrade over time and the frequency and depth of proficiency and refresher training to keep crew proficient needs to be studied. A numbers of factors are known to affect the crew on-board performance: psychological and physiological stress factors of the space flights, pre-flight training program fidelity, skill degradation, man-machine compatibility, etc. An on-board system capable of correcting and compensating for these factors would be required to decrease probability of potential crew error. This point is even stronger in the case of manned space exploration. Currently Canada has technology on orbit in the Russian Segment of the International Space Station to conduct experiments tracking the status of crew degradation in ability to perform tasks essential to the operation of complex space vehicle equipment. This research project looks at studying performance degradation and skills recovery as it applies to complex psycho-motor and mental activity. The long-term goal of this research project is to gather data to help determine the frequency of on orbit training and/or the approach to onboard training to ensure that complex systems are operated safely. This project is ongoing since 2003, we have sent H/W in space twice already. This presentation will address the technological challenges required to build a simulator and associated analysis tool software able to run on a stand alone computer. It will also present preliminary results and experimental setup onboard the International Space Station