First full day at the Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS)

The location of the hab is perfect. We might as well be on Mars! The sight of the hab would be familiar to anyone who has read books on Martian exploration by humans, and yet it seems so much smaller than I had imagined. The inside, however, is extremely spacious and there is plenty of space to live and work comfortably and have fun doing it. Having a creative and competent crew with a lot of enthusiasm and a good sense of humor doesn't hurt!

A conversation with Bill Clancey at Ames is what sparked my interest in this project. There are so many procedures that a crew must follow in order to maintain the habitat, and others that must be followed to diagnose and isolate problems, and to fix problems once they have been detected. At Ames we've been working on a language called PLEXIL that encodes the control flow and semantics for the execution of plans and procedures, thereby allowing them to be executed either manually or autonomously. Paul Tompkins, Bill and I thought it might be a good idea to encode MDRS procedures in PLEXIL, specially since the Maarten Sierhuis, Ron Van Hoof, John Dowding and Mike Scott were going to work on acquiring data from the power system and monitoring sensor values.

The very first thing every crew does is go though a handover with the previous crew. During this time various members of the previous crew bring you up to date on the current performance of various hab systems such as power, water, GreenHab, grey water recycling, health and safety, and evacuation. The crew that handed over to us was a friendly and competent Austrian crew who had been living in the hab in Martian simulation for two weeks. It was clear, however, that the transfer of information was going to be partial. It is human nature to focus on the systems that are not functioning at the time and our handover was no exception. We focused on grey water recycling and power generation, but missed many of the other systems. Much of the information was transferred in informal conversations with random subsets of each crew present. I couldn't help but think how much more accurate and complete it would have been if the handover procedure could be automated. With automated procedures, any deviation from operating procedures that the previous crew made might be captured as they were performing the procedures. The updated procedure could then be handed over to the incoming crew.

Today we made a small step in the direction of representing the generator restart in PLEXIL. We intend to integrate this with the Mobile Agents power system monitoring agent later this week. Bill and Brent wired up the entire place with a Cricket system that will localize astronauts in the hab. They were very creative and climbed all over the place and used kitchen implements in addition to real tools and hard hats. Later in the week they will also have video and audio capture of astronaut activities. The correlation of crew position, video and audio will be very useful in analyzing crew work patterns and their responses to habitat system faults.

Dinner here is my favorite meal since we all sit together and savor one of Bill's gourmet creations. After that we get to go out and see the night sky – the ISS was so clear last night, as was the hab with Mars in the background.

I'm looking forward to the coming days. I think I'm going to be surprised by what I learn. One exchanges so many ideas when you and your collaborators are all in the same place twenty four hours a day!