On a Field Trip under the Sea with Draper and NASA’s Aquanauts

CAMBRIDGE, MA—On the ocean floor, everyday activities such as walking, using tools and transporting gear can be a real challenge. Movement is slow, and conditions can be disorienting. Astronauts are among the few who find such undersea environments helpful as they prepare for the challenges of living and working in space.

Tristan Endsley, a senior systems human engineer at Draper, sees a challenge of another kind—designing a work environment for the tight confines inside space habitats that takes into account crew tasking objectives, required tools and their location and coordination with other team members to complete a mission. Loading up astronauts with an overabundance of high-tech gear can only make problems worse.

“Space environments can introduce stressors to both crewmember physiology and behavioral psychology,” said Endsley. “Our goal is to increase the safety, physical and mental performance of the crew in extreme environments.” As a Draper engineer, Endsley studies the interaction of people with their physical environment, tasks and technologies, and devises ways humans can work productively, efficiently and safely to accomplish mission goals—even in challenging environments.

Recently, Endsley and a group of engineers from Draper visited an undersea research lab for astronauts in Islamorada, Fla., where they directed experiments involving Draper technology as part of the space agency’s 23rd Extreme Environment Mission Operations (NEEMO) expedition. During NEEMO, scientists and astronauts—or aquanauts—use the ocean as an analog for space, tapping into the weightless environment to train, test equipment and conduct experiments.

For nine days, the aquanauts lived in the Aquarius Reef Base, an undersea research station located 62 feet below the Atlantic Ocean in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary that is owned and operated by the Florida International University. The aquanauts studied the potential challenges that come with living in such an extreme environment and test several emerging technologies, including Draper systems, inside the habitat and during simulated spacewalks.

Aquanauts at NEEMO 23 tested two Draper technologies. Undersea they wore Draper’s wearable kinematics system (WKS) to map the environment, track aquanaut position and orientation and time- and location-tag carbon dioxide (CO2) measurements within the habitat. The aquanauts also operated Draper’s lunar landing simulator to characterize how mission events and the analogous environment to spaceflight affect their ability to perform on a complex, operationally relevant task—piloting a spacecraft.

Draper’s end goal for the WKS is to develop a flight-ready wearable position estimation system, according to Ted Steiner, senior member of Draper’s technical staff and the technical lead and head engineer for the wearable kinematics system. “We anticipate an increase in human space exploration, which means we are going to see more astronauts working and living in long-duration microgravity environments. The data from the WKS brings us a step closer to understanding the effects and interactions of behavioral stressors, psychosocial stressors, spacecraft layout and task design and timelines,” Steiner said.

Information gathered during NEEMO 23 will provide critical insight for future astronauts and design of spacecraft, but there are also applications on Earth, according to Kevin Duda, group leader for space and mission critical systems at Draper. 

“Knowing your location within an enclosed or confined environment is a key benefit not just for astronauts but also soldiers, submariners, maintenance personnel, first responders and oil rig workers,” Duda said. “Fundamentally, the wearable kinematic system has the potential to be a location services provider in environments where GPS or other radio frequency-based systems are not available.”

Joining the Draper team at NEEMO 23 was Sherrie Hall, an aerospace human factors and space systems engineer of Draper and Forrest Meyen, a space systems engineer and program manager for Draper’s Sembler innovation office.

Steiner, Endsley and Duda recently published a paper on the wearable vision and inertial navigation system and described new advances in Draper’s SAMWISE vision-aided inertial navigation estimate algorithms.